Agiliko
Actionable Data that Empower Enterprises

Data is the most under-utilized asset in organizations; leveraged properly it can lead to compelling insights that result in informed and better decisions. However, collecting, processing, and analyzing data across applications, systems and data stores is no small feat. This is the forte of Agiliko: technology and expertise to derive actionable insights from information. The firm, an IT consulting firm specializing in data analytics; strategic IT and advisory services; web and mobile solution; and project and portfolio management, is focused on providing high-performance results and quality service for the public sector. In this interview, two Agiliko Partners, Scott Cosby and Rich Dougherty, discuss the challenges that their BI and analytics services mitigate, data governance importance, and their vision for the company’s future.

Please give us a brief overview of the company:

We started out as consultants for the public sector and, after we got our MBAs, moved into the private sector to help grow small and large companies alike. With a common drive to build our own business, we realized public sector organizations would greatly benefit from private sector best practices and expertise; this became Agiliko’s founding vision.

Challenges in the BI and Analytics Solution Space

Over the years, our clients leveraged BI tools and analytics to increase operational efficiency and develop needed capabilities. The pain points that our customers face can be categorized into distinct areas. First: How to engage with their external constituents in new and different ways. Data inside an organization can be highly siloed based on application environments; we help bring that data together into a platform that allows them to more easily understand their customer and constituent needs. Second: How they manage their internal operations and optimize processes to reduce manpower time and costs. Third: Help organizations identify new data uses. For example, leverage an ability to rapidly ingest new data sets to develop customer insights; perform data experimentation and “what if” analysis; or identify “red flag” emerging risk factors previously unknown to the organization.

In short, help our clients understand the challenges that exist in the market by analyzing data, leverage the upcoming trends and adjust the course of their business accordingly. Three Steps to Success:

We are a professional services firm, so we customize our approaches to every client to ensure successful project execution. But specific to BI and analytics projects, we find there are three keys to success that do not vary across industries. First, an organization needs to have clear business objectives for their BI and analytics project. The path to customer success starts with clear and specific business challenges or opportunities. Second, IT leaders must partner with their peers in the business to enable long-term impact of data in decision-making. Too often BI projects are driven by IT teams without sufficient input from business users, putting the project at significant risk. Third, BI & analytic projects must deliver meaningful business value to the organization. Data cannot just be “interesting,” it must be ACTIONABLE.

The Importance of Data Governance:

Effective data governance provides oversight, ensures stakeholder collaboration, and facilitates cross-functional decisions for data subject areas. Enterprises that have business intelligence capabilities can use sleek and visual tools to capture and analyze data, but without active data governance, the results cannot be trusted, accessible and secure. For our clients, we not only have rich technical solutions, but we also specialize in bringing proven best practices that establish business-driven, practical data governance capabilities and enable the organization to manage data as an enterprise asset.

Case Study:

One of our financial sector clients was confronted with challenges at multiple levels. They could capture data in an operational manner but were not able to optimize it for analytical reporting and not easily identify data sources of authority. We took a two-pronged approach to tackle their business challenges: On one track, we promoted a data-centric approach to priority data domains. This involved identifying data creators, users and consumers of the data and building repeatable processes to develop useful analytic data. On a parallel track, we worked with the client to build a strategic data roadmap of how they would mature enterprise data capabilities over time and establish data governance. A pilot project for one division of their business was developed to analyze the risks associated with loan portfolios using a modern data warehouse along with advanced BI tools. Through this initiative they have been able to identify hidden risks and reduce the time required to analyze the data.

Vision for the Future:

Agiliko is proud of our success helping clients transform the way they leverage data by focusing on the business challenges; forming trusted partnerships between IT and business line leadership; and continuously delivering value to the business lines to help them achieve their objectives. Whether its machine learning or advanced artificial intelligence, we deliver data capabilities for our clients in a way that is impactful and sustainable for the long term.