using big data to quantify loyalty - 'do you come here often?

Democratizing Analytics Lessons Learned at Barnes & Noble

Company Overview

• Established in 1873 • Nearly 700 retail locations, hosting nearly

100,000 community events every year • Yearly sales of 300 million copies of 1 million

unique titles • Extremely dynamic sales environment,

Bestsellers account for less than 5% of sales

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NOOK®

• B&N introduced NOOK in 2009, now represents 27% of all eBook sales

• Business has grown to include apps, magazines, movies and TV shows

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Background

• Aster customer since 2010 • Aster is our enterprise data warehouse • Our implementation contains over 100TB of

data and is growing by ~6TB per month • Recent adoptee of Tableau Reporting Software

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Data Culture

• Top-down mandate to eliminate information silos

• ETL group “loads first, asks questions later” • Users have access to as much data as we can

provide

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Analysts

• Some subject matter expertise

• Comfortable with spreadsheets and SQL

• Fully immersed in the specific challenges and priorities of their department

• Readily available 12/18/2012 © 2012 Barnes & Noble, Inc. 7

Data Scientists

• Experts in math, statistics, data engineering, pattern recognition and learning, modeling, etc, etc.

• Expensive, hard to find and often hard to integrate into non-technical teams 12/18/2012 © 2012 Barnes & Noble, Inc. 8

Business Leaders

• Significant subject matter expertise

• Limited technical expertise

• Responsible for departmental outcomes

• Swamped

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Citizens Analysts Data Scientists Business Leaders

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Lesson 1

Analytics have to keep pace with the organization if they have any hope of adding value to the organization

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Lesson 2

There is a lot to be gained in allowing business users access to data systems before they are ‘perfect’

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Lesson 3

The best tools encourage collaboration

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Questions or Comments?

Rafael Mejia rmejia@book.com

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