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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