Sales Talk Track for IT

anne_milley

 JMP 15 and IT

 

Usage:  This is intended to be a living document.  We need sales’ help validating this messaging.  Does it play well?  We will gladly incorporate changes in future versions of this document in the spirit of continuous improvement.  Thank you!  For additional information on JMP Live, please see the JMP Live/JMP Server/JMP Public FAQ. 

 

AUDIENCE: IT who seek to execute on a vision that includes enabling users with efficient and effective tools to derive value from data in pursuit of organizational goals. This includes supporting tools to enable collaboration and sharing in a secure, governed environment.

CRITICAL BUSINESS ISSUE: Provide users with easy-to-manage discovery tools to let them easily self-provision their data, make their data analysis-ready with easy data prep capabilities (in minutes, not hours), perform a wide variety of analyses on their data to address organizational priorities, including easily sharing analysis results for collaboration and communication.

GOAL:  Enable users to innovate and create value from growing volumes of increasingly complex data by investing in appropriate technologies that are ideally easy to manage, extensible, and flexible. 

 

1. Defining the Problem

Customer Issue Description

Many organizations have not made smart investments to liberate and better leverage their data.  It starts with data access issues, but often continues with inadequate tools to easily prepare data for analysis to gain insights and create value, all the way through to sharing results to collaborate further or to communicate the current results of a given analysis.   Data access:  Databases are great for efficiently storing and structuring data, but data in this form are not analysis-ready. Joining multiple tables to make them analysis-ready can be significant work, often involving learning SQL or other tools, adding more steps to the process. Many users depend on IT to get data for them, resulting in delays, bottlenecks, and inefficient use of skill sets. Getting value from data:  Even if users have access to the data, they still need to prepare it for analysis and this often leads to other applications adding more steps to the process.  Preparing data for analysis can be very tedious and time consuming.  ETL tools were designed for IT, but users need easy-to-use data manipulation tools integrated into their analytic workbench and whole analytic workflow.  IT recognizes the need for such tools to more quickly realize value from data, but ideally, these tools need to be easy to manage.  IT seeks to avoid proliferation of multiple tools as this unnecessarily adds to the complexity of managing their environment and may lead to multiple deployment, security, and governance strategies.  Efficiently and effectively sharing information with those who need it:  Information producers need to easily share analysis results with others—for collaboration or to convey latest results in a secure environment that is easily managed.  The sharing process is often very manual, both for the information producers as well as the information consumers, so sharing results of repetative analysis can be greatly facilitated by JMP Live.

 

Business Impacts of Not Addressing the Issue

·  For users, they may be frustrated at having to learn multiple tools to access, prepare, and analyze data as well as share resulting information—or rely on inadequate tools like Excel. If they depend on IT to provision their data, they may incur bottlenecks, delays, and may not get what they thought they asked for, requiring new requests and more delays.  Even if they have the data, they still need data preparation and analysis tools.  If they don’t have a well-appointed analytic workbench that’s optimized for discovery, they may completely miss important things in the data or take longer to find them, sacrificing opportunity and productivity. If they don’t have an efficient and effective way to share results, they resort to emailing spreadsheets, powerpoints, and other time-consuming means of disseminating information. ·  For IT, a strength/advantage we have is that JMP is so broad and customizable.  IT can reduce the number of applications they support (by getting rid of applications redundant with JMP capabilities) and free up resources to work on higher-priority projects.  Reports can be automated further freeing up resources.  IT can be seen as a strategic partner and a true enabler by providing users one easy-to-use tool to extract data to their desktops (which can offload work on servers and may make run times for other work faster), minimize the tedium of data preparation, and in that same tool have the ability to do a variety of powerful analyses as well as share results with interactive graphical output.

 

External Validation of the Business Impact

“The world of analytics has changed. In the old days, IT took care of analytics. Business analysts would ask for various reports and IT would put it together (often with SAS).  Today, analysts have to be in-the-moment and this is facilitated by JMP. Not only does data need to be self-provisioned, but analyses are self-directed and self-actuated. The ways in which results are communicated have also changed and doesn’t have to involve IT in the process.  IT is there to set and maintain s/w (licensing, installs, deployment of OS, networking, security, applications) and h/w infrastructure that allows business/science/engineering analysts to think, discover, innovate, collaborate, and share. “We have played this message repeatedly and find it helpful. Sometimes IT folks are reluctant because they see themselves losing prestige because as the function moves from IT to the analysts - so goes the glory. So I would play up their role in maintaining the infrastructure as being absolutely essential.”  -Wayne Levin, President and Founder of Predictum

 

 

Challenges/Barriers to Addressing the Issue

·   Not everyone wants or needs to learn multiple tools to access, prepare, explore, and analyze data, as well as share information. ·  People may not know that they can use JMP to access data (vs. using other tools or waiting for IT to provide data) and stay in JMP (vs. using tools like Excel) to more easily prepare, explore, and analyze data, and to share analysis results. ·  IT (and users) may be unaware of the options to more easily manage the value-add capabilities that JMP brings, further leveraging their investment in such powerful software:  JMP’s customizable deployment via preferences and apps, as well as the repeatability via apps, jsl, add-ins, shared queries, and now the ability to publish interactive graphs and analysis results via JMP Live.

 

1. JMP’s Solution to the Problem

Our Approach and Value Proposition

Easy-to-manage yet powerful data access, data wrangling, and discovery tool to make the entire organization more productive. Repeatable and sharable logic for queries, applications, and dashboards.  One software tool—JMP—can be used for the entire value-creation process:  import, shape, explore, and analyze data and share findings to make better decisions. JMP allows users to be productive with no internet connection, so it’s mobile.  JMP integrates with SAS, R, Matlab, and now Python. Self-service data access, data prep, and exploration allows users flexibility and agility, including creating reusable components while freeing up IT resources to work on more strategic things.  Self-service data prep is a new market segment with vendors like Alteryx, Datawatch, IBM SPSS, and start-ups like Paxata, Trifacta and now Tableau’s Tableau Prep.  These tools typically include discovery, variable transformation, collaboration, data blending, metadata repository, data modelling (here in the IT sense of logical data models / discoverying relationships among data source attributes, not statistical model building, e.g., modelling systems, behaviors, processes).  JMP has been doing self-service data prep and improving on it for over 25 years.  JMP also provides award-winning, free technical support. ·  Easy data access. Users can self-provision the most current data, without knowing SQL or relying on others to fetch data.  ·  Potential for better data quality.  Self-service data prep can contribute to data governance via improved data quality techniques / metadata (but will not replace the need for data governance programs). ·  Better use of skills.  JMP can make users and IT more productive.  Analysts can more intuitively access, prepare, explore, and analyze data as well as collaborate, present, and share findings with one tool—or if sharing needs to occur more broadly with non-JMP users, JMP Live can be used to automate and schedule reports.  These capabilities let IT be more strategic. ·  Better analysis flow. By eliminating the need for even one tool to access, prepare, visualize or analyze data, there is opportunity to eliminate steps in the analysis process. ·  Potential to support fewer tools.  If other tools are being used to access, prepare, visualize, or analyze data—and still others to collaborate or share findings, some tools may be expendable, meaning less maintenance, support and potentially cost.   ·  Customizaeble and repeatable. Deployment can be customized via preferences, apps, and add-ins.  Work can be easily repeated via shared apps, jsl, add-ins, publishing to JMP Live, and shared queries.

Differentiating Capabilities

·  Multi-purpose tool.  Intuitive interface to get data (including many sampling options), prepare it, visualize it, and analyze it.  Analysis types span more methods than many of our competitors:  predictive / descriptive modelling (including newer methods like trees, neural nets, generalized regression and now text exploration), quality and reliability, DOE, consumer research, and analytical app dev.  With a low starting cost and steep discount curve, organizations can get more value. ·  Elegant design. Simple interface with a fast learning curve.  ·  Easy querying.  Users can quickly create complex ad hoc queries with no knowledge of database schema or syntax. ·  Extensive data prep.  Numerous intuitive options to clean, transform, and manipulate data to prepare it for analysis—easy options for dealing with categorical, continuous, and missing data. ·  Application rationalization/less support & maintenance.  While we’re not replacing ETL tools, we have the potential to replace tools with overlapping functionality.  Many software vendors provide data manipulation capabilities as this is necessary for discovery, e.g., Alteryx partners with Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft. We have the potential to eliminate data-fetching and prep tools as well as visualization and analysis tools providing better workflow and value.  ·  Extensibility:  JMP’s scripting language, Application Builder and dashboarding abilities make it easy to build applications/dashboards to share with others and make them more productive.  The same can be said for JMP add-ins, freely available on the File Exchange.  JMP’s Run Program feature extends this even further with JSL to any executable available on your system. By using a Run Program Object, you can send and receive data from executables you launch in a controlled and efficient manner.  Scripting is not limited to the capabilities of JSL. Anything your computer can do -- image processing, audio conversion, process management, you name it — can be performed by JMP.  IT has the ability to leverage JMP and other tools to deploy applications to users and make them more efficient.  With JMP Live, users can more easily share graphs and analysis results in a secure environment that is easily managed, even with non-JMP users.

 

Case Study

Schott AG

Situation:  Need to develop more efficient production processes.

Solution:  JSL is used to automate data access, analysis, and visualization. With a few mouse clicks, engineers can extract from a database all relevant process parameters, preprocessed and analyzed, and JMP presents the results in a customized summary report saved as a basis for further discussions.

Results:  JMP Scripting Language allows SCHOTT engineers to bypass redundant tasks and arrive at more-informed decisions faster. The result is consistent improvement in the quality of products and an increase in yield.

1. Sales Cycle Guidance

Prospecting Criteria
Growing complexity
·  In this era of increasingly complex systems, processes, and data, JMP streamlines the analysis flow. ·  Growing data complexity—sensor data, streaming data, text data, data strewn across multiple databases with more rows and columns—means intuitive, visual analysis tools with smart defaults will help realize value from data sooner. ·  More applications running in multiple enviroments makes managing them more complicated—app proliferation concerns.
Saving time
·  Do some decisions take days or weeks when they should take minutes or hours? ·  Are users equipped with the tools to allow them to easily access and manipulate data for analysis?  Are IT resources reactive or proactive in enabling the organization to create value from data? ·  Are IT staff spending a lot of time fetching data?  Do analysts complain that they have to kludge SQL to access data and that it’s time-consuming and because they aren’t proficient with SQL, that they often have to revise and resubmit queries? Do they complain that they get a data dump that they have to work with for months before getting a refreshed version? ·  Is the sharing process arduous and manual, formatting results into static slides or spreadsheets to be emailed or otherwise presented? ·  Many repetitive tasks—queries, data prep, analysis, dashboards and reports--aren’t automated so time is wasted.  JMP software can work harder so users and IT don’t have to.
Better use of resources
·  Do analysts and IT staff complain that their skills could be put to better use? ·  Are analysts using whatever means are available to them to get the data they need—other query tools, customer apps set up by IT that first required them to download the data to Excel or a flat file and then import into another tool, coding SQL, one-off Python scripts, having JSL-savvy colleagues write scripts that execute SQL…? ·  Are analysts using a separate tool to prepare the data for analysis like Excel (which is known to be incredibly inefficient and was not designed for data prep), or newer data-prep tools like Alteryx, Trifacta’s Wrangler, or Tableau Prep?  Are they using still other tools to visualize and analyze data?  If so, JMP may provide them with all they need in one product.

 

 

Conversation Starters

·  Are people spending a lot of time doing data-fetching and prep work? Describe the current process. ·  What tools do you use to make the data analysis-ready? ·  Why is data cleaning and preparation so painful?    o Are IT and business units not aligned on their data analysis initiatives?    o Are company resources constrained to meet the growing data volume demands?    o Are data in silos with each department organizing their own data to meet their needs? ·  Do you have strategies and solutions to blend data repeatably and consistently so it can be consumed by the appropriate stakeholders: data scientists, quality engineers, analysts, etc.? ·  Do you have separate tools to explore and visualize the data—if so, what are they? ·  What about textual data—what tools do you use to leverage text? ·  Who are the key users of the current tools? ·  How do you typically share information from your analysis?  Is it easy and quick to share dynamic graphs and results? ·  How do analysts collaborate?

 

Sales Cycle Tips

·   If IT is burdened with data fetching and preparation, JMP can help. ·   In addition to accessing data, JMP provides many self-service data prep capabilities to deal with messy data and to make it analysis-ready—recode, informative missing, etc.—and we are integrated with SAS, R, Excel, Matlab and Python. ·   We simplify the whole process—querying and preparing data for analysis, feeding information and graphs into dashoards and JMP Live so informed decisions and next steps can take place.

 

1. Capabilities Map

Expanded Discussion of JMP Capabilities and the Value Created/Vision

Capability Description	Diagnostic Questions	So What? Value/Impact
No need to rely on IT to fetch data ·   JMP provides a simple interface to create complex ad hoc querries that can be viewed, edited, saved, repeated and shared. ·   JMP allows for easily importing a variety of file types.	·   Are your analysts comfortable using SQL?  Do they get frustrated waiting on IT to provision data? ·   Do they have to re-requisition the data if they didn’t get what they thought they were asking for?	·   Liberate your data, your analysts and IT by letting users self-provision in the target tool they need to use anyway (JMP). ·   By giving them a more intuitive tool that’s part of their analytic workbench, they can be more productive.
Eliminate unnecessary steps in accessing data and getting it in shape for analysis ·   JMP lets you avoid using other tools to first extract the data, prepare it, and then do analysis. ·   From a single interface, you can access data, join tables, sample, transform variables and create new ones, explore missing values and determine the best way to treat them—easily recode and reshape your data.  From the same interface, you can now publish interactive graphs and reports to share with JMP Live.	·   Are analysts having to use data extraction tools to first dump the data in a flat file (.csv, .xls…) before importing it into an analysis tool? ·   Are analysts also challenged to prepare the data for analysis?  Are they using Excel or other tools for this?  Are they using similar tools to share results?	·   JMP collapses many data-fetching and prep steps into fewer making users more productive and freeing IT to work on higher-value projects. ·   With JMP’s many data access and prep capabilities, analysts can leverage one tool for making their data analysis-ready.  JMP will help analysts find anomalies in the data faster and provides options to best treat them with visualizations that let them more easily see things they might otherwise miss. And now they can use the same interface to share results via JMP Live.
Further leverage one tool for analysis and extensibility ·   Flow from data exploration and preparation right into analysis and insight with JMP’s many analysis capabilities. ·   With the same tool, share findings and minimize meeting time by making stakeholders a part of your analytic journey showing them how you arrived at the insights and have the ability to address what-ifs on the fly without the need to schedule follow-up meetings.  Or let them interact with your published results even if they don’t have JMP via JMP Live.	·   Are analysts using multiple tools to wrangle their data, explore it, analyze it, reshape it…? ·   Do analysts have one tool that meets 80% of their data prep and analysis needs or are they spending time moving data to a variety of different tools to get their work done? ·   Are analysts repeating steps that could be automated, but they don’t know how to make their routine work more easily repeatable, including disseminating their findings?	·   Simplify and streamline your workflow and leverage one easy-to-use tool to do more. ·   Extend the value of JMP to automate repeated tasks, share with others to make steps more repeatable and faster. ·   Better leverage IT and user skills and align data effectiveness initiatives to create more value more quickly.