Visiting the Boohoo.com offices – some advices to improving your analytic skills on your own

I had the chance to meet with two brilliant self-taught analysts at Boohoo.com, Jenna and Dan E. who both have an unexpected past. They gave me an insight into business intelligence, data analysis and UX, and some great advice that I decided to share with you in this post.

Two months ago Boohoo.com, the online retail store, organised an event for students and graduates to introduce them to the job opportunities available at the company. The event itself was more of a marketing event to introduce people to the “We are us” brand but it allowed people to network, meet the team, ask about the different job/internship/placement opportunities; someone even secured a summer internship.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jenna. I really liked the short presentation on the insight (business intelligence) team so I approached her. Jenna had a rough past; she went through some challenging experiences and through hard work got where she is now. What I remember most from our conversation is her telling me “If I can do it, anyone can do it” (she forgot to add “if you are as driven and smart as she is). She invited me to come see her at work, an invitation that I accepted last week (I have been busy with my dissertation).

Super Jenna squeezed me into her busy schedule and arranged for me to see people from the insight and the e-commerce teams.

 After going through the labyrinth of an office that is the Boohoo.com headquarter, grabbing some smoothies from the beautifully designed Attics shops (Jenna kindly offered me one), I met Darren who is the business intelligence, the smart one, Jenna says. I started in the insight department where Jenna introduced me the business intelligence system, Qlikview. Qlikview is a platform that allows the merger, the search, the viewing and analysis of all data giving a “full insight” of the performance of sales, products, pages, PPC, and other organisational elements. The analytic platform runs reports and creates dashboards that detect market changes and product sales. Jenna showed me some of the software features, the ones she mainly uses, including business management, Excel reports, automatisation, bookmarking and creating labels.

Between a sip of those delicious smoothies and our talks about projects on homelessness Jenna manage to squeeze in some tips on things to focus on and which I can teach myself. So if you would like to become a business intelligence consultant or work in similar area here some things to focus on or even if you have an online business:

1. Qlikview – It is available online for free, you will only need to pay for licenses to share reports on different systems. There are online communities including one the Qlick website  to help you start up and communities for more advanced users. You will appreciate its compatibility to MSExcel and MS Access. For more information on the product you can check the detailed reviews on G2crowd.
2. Tableau – is an alternative to Qlikview. For those who have used Google Analytics before, you will appreciate that the design is similar and it does not require technical skills (while you may need some SQL skills to set up the report automatisation on Qlikview). You can also get extra reviews on G2crowd.
3. SQL – Jenna advised to learn SQL language online. You can find some good tutorial on search engines.
4. MS Excel – This tool can be used in any industry and in any field of work (really, from logistics to banking and from finance to marketing, everyone uses Excel) so it is definitely worth mastering it.

So that was my day with Jenna. I came back two days later to steal Dan E.’s last few hours before the weekend. He is a politics major who train himself to becoming an analyst (he is also geek he says). Dan E. is part of the UX (user experience) and e-commerce team and mostly works with Google Analytics. He measures customer trends, journey through the website against goal metrics and works on improving UX and thus sales.

Seating in the Boohoo.com Attics shop, Dan E. explained the ways the customer experience was tested, how the data about trend was collected, and other elements such as targets, data source and data interpretation. Unfortunately he was not allowed show me the company’s Google Analytics account or the actual tests being ran on the website but his examples were specific enough for me to get a clear picture of what the UX and e-commerce team does (my dream job), how they use trends and data, and how UX can be tested to improve sales.

This is what is to be remembered about analytic from the hour-and-a-half conversation:

1. Data is expansive – There is no way you can use everything or see everything.
2. Always start with a hypothesis otherwise it is like “searching for a needle in a sack of needle”. Starting with a hypothesis will give you some direction and will keep you focused otherwise you might find yourself dealing with extensive data. You can then focus on proving or refuting the hypothesis.
3. Every industry is different – There is no general advice with regards to when, how or how often to review your hypothesis. In term of trends, mood and speed each company is also different. In the case of Boohoo.com for example it’s a fast pace online retail firm that needs constant reviewing of UX on different pages or innovative UX for each country.

All in all this was a really insightful unique experience. My final advice for you is to approach the company you would like to work for or a company in the same industry and checking if the company, the industry or even the position is right for you.

Thanks to Jenna for organising this visit and to Dan E. for taking time off his busy schedule.

 

Go Digital (Part 1): 4 steps to developing your digital strategy

You are a small or medium entrepreneur and you are looking to get in touch with exciting and new customers through the Internet. A digital strategy can be a key differentiator between those who thrive and those who survive in today’s marketing landscape. ‘Digital channels and engagement through digital channels are now not only an expected part of audience experience when connecting with a brand, they are often at the core of an audience member’s engagement with a brand’’. Here are steps to developing your digital strategy and useful digital tools to support it.

4 steps to developing your digital strategy

1. Planning

Before anything you must analyse and identify the focus of the strategy. In order to do so you need to identify where you are (current position), where you want to get (expected returns) and how do we get there, by looking at the background of the brand. Furthermore you must determine your audience, the different segments targeted, and the audience location then compare the value of each segment to the current position. And of course budget.

2. Creation

The creation stage focuses on campaign formulation.  Based on step one you can then design and build campaign channels (mobile, social media, email, website, etc.), create KPIs per channels, plan and establish realisation routes, communication flows and expectations.

3. Actualisation

Once you have established the aim of the campaign and planned it, you can focus on the delivery of the campaign. This includes actually engaging with your audience though the various channels, optimising the campaign message and sampling progress for the evaluation.

4. Evaluation

This final step is vital to determine the success of your campaign and learn from it to build stronger future campaign. Evaluate KPIs and fiscal achievement; score the strategy and benefits that the campaign has brought.

Check out the next post for useful tools for your digital strategy.

 

My most inspiring lecture – Technology for disabled people

On our last day with David Krep we had to come up with ideas to make the internet more accessible to paraplegic Olympians. With the help of one paraplegic student we got very insightful information about the technology that is available out there for disabled people.

 

Week 3, Lecture 1 with David – Presentation on 3 papers

We were divided into 3 groups and were allocated papers to read, discuss then present.
Our group was given a paper by Wanda J. Or’kowski called The duality of technology: rethinking the concept of technology in organisations.
The paper regarded the flexibility and the duality of technology.

Duality of technology:

• Technologies are products of their time and in organisational context which reflects the materials, conditionas, and knowledges at a given time in history.
• Related to the physical and historical origins of technology innovations.

Flexibility of technology:

• It depends on how technology is interpreted, used and designed
• the materials/components of the technology also influences the flexibility of the technology.
• Time also influences the flexibility as the use of technology can be habituated and put into a routine over time therby becoming less modifiable.

Reflective remarks:

The paper was quite lengthy, I wish we would have had more time to read the full paper and get the full message. Each group did a great presentation although it was apparent that no one had been able to read their paper in full. Our paper had a philosophical level to it presenting a interesting view on the concept of technology.

 

The story of socio-technical design: reflections on its successes, failures and potential – an article review

Enid Mumford, one of the pioneer of the social-technical approach, discussee the evolution of the approach stressing:

• the values it embraces,
• the followers of this approach,
• and organisation that practice it.

Firstly the author discuss the early history of the approach and how the pioneer from the Tavistock Institute in London came about to developing it. She talks about the foundation of the Institute and how the approach was well welcomed but the 1970s but the trend faded away later. The author discuss the possible reasons behind that.

Secondly the author introduced the value of the ST approach which is the need to humanise work place by redesigning  of tasks and implementing democracy at work through the “joint optimisation of the social and technical systems” (Mumford, 2006: 321).

Thirdly the author examines how the values of ST approach have been reinterpreted. Fred Emery, for example, introduced the concept “redundancy of function” according to which employees should be able to perform different task so the organisation can better cope with unexpected situations. Cherns described the principles of ST approach, which will be looked at in the next post. The author mentions other pioneers such a William Pasmore and Herbst.

Next the author looks at the international development of the approach. The Scandinavian countries were the architect behind  this approach and the rest of Europe and the USA were very interested in these research on these new humanistic approaches. She goes into details about the evolution of the approach in each country.

Thereafter she looks at why the approach was popular in the 1970s and not so popular afterwards. In the 1970s organisations experienced labour problems as the industries expended and there was an incentive to keep your employees. In the 1980s and the 1990s however, the industry were pressured to cut cost due to the growing global competition. Lean production and neo-Taylorism was preffered models as ST approach seems risky and costly. A few companies like Rolls Rayce tried to keep the balance between the technical and social systems.

Finally the author consider the future by looking at the possible future changes in organisations as well as the nature of work.  She observe what ST approach can contribute to the future systems.

 

Mumford,E. (2006). The story of socio-technical design: reflections on its successes, failures and potential. Information systems Journal, 16, 317-342.

 

On the Eve of Valentine’s day…

A little something for the couples in a long-distance relationship on this Valentine’s day Eve. Technology and social network take relationships to the next level.

 

Kiiroo will fuse together a social network, sensor technology and…,  so that long distance partners can stay connected. Toon Timmermans got the idea…

Click on the images to see the full article.

 

Sommerville makes sense of the concept of social-technical systems

In this video Ian Sommerville:

1. Defines what a systems is,
2. Defines systems components and the complexity in interacting components,
3. Distinguishes between technical system (computer based system that are not self aware) and social-technical system which includes individuals (and is self aware),
4. Introduces the social-technical stack and explains its layers,
5. Explains the interdependencies of STS layers,
6. Mentions system dependencies.

This video is very insightful and serve as a great introduction to the topic of Social-Technical Systems.

Video fetched from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdFftbIToV0