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“Big data” might be the defining buzzword of the 21st Century.

You can hardly look anywhere these days without data being referenced as an integral part of any successful business.
                                                    
Data → Key Insights → Business Decisions → Success

This is no secret, but it’s also extremely vague: what actually happens within that first transformation (i.e. from data to key insights)?

How can you turn DATA into actionable INSIGHTS?

You might think the answer here is software, and you’d be partially correct.

But only partially...

Why your data process is coming up short

Let’s start by looking at the data analysis process for customer experience feedback.

This process can be divided into 3 parts:

1.	Data cleansing & preprocessing
2.	Data mining via advanced algorithms
3.	Data interpretation and presentation

In Step #1, qualitative data like customer experience in the form of feedback or commentary must be cleansed and preprocessed for software recognition. Extracting arbitrary ingredients like user feelings, sentiment, and overall experience is a time consuming process that requires long-term consistency for meaningful results.

Step #2 is where your data software comes into play, mining the correctly processed (hopefully) data for patterns based on designated algorithms and analytics. The effectiveness of Step #2 depends on the accuracy of Step #1, and while your software handles the required processing power, the relevance and benefit of the outputs depends entirely on the software inputs and setup.

A bow will shoot your arrow exactly where you aim. The key is aiming that bow correctly. If you want to hit a specific target, you need an expert to aim the bow properly. Similarly, your software will process your data precisely as you direct it, but in order to produce a meaningful output, you need an expert at the helm.

Finally, Step #3 is entirely in the hands of your team. Do they have the experience and skill to turn data patterns into useful business insights? And if so, can they communicate and present these advanced technological concepts to less technical business leaders?

For most businesses, the answer is “No.” 

Very few businesses these days have the talent to make this process work like it’s intended to. A lack of expertise at any given step will yield ineffective results.

This extra ingredient that turns data into actionable insights

Your analysis software is only going to identify patterns, and no matter what the software vendor claims, it takes a true expert to interpret these patterns correctly.

If you’re not a data scientist, what are you supposed to do?

What’s the solution?

The answer is expert analysis. You need someone trained and experienced in reading and interpreting data.

You need experts working with you. You need true data scientists to produce actionable insights.

Unfortunately, hiring and retaining this type of talent is an expensive nightmare for most companies. There is a MASSIVE shortage of big data talent in the market right now.

Hiring talent is difficult, but retaining it is equally challenging. Even juggernauts like LinkedIn are struggling to keep analytics experts, losing their top two guys recently.

You could hire out of college, but you’ll invest heavily in on-the-job training with no guarantee of a payoff, as these recruits will have multiple job offers once they hit the 2-3 year mark - right when you would actually start seeing a return on your investment.

To put it simply, even with a big budget, expert analysis is difficult to come by, and if you don’t have a fortune to spend, you’re already dead in the water.

You might be wondering, what now?

Fortunately, there’s a new option available that allows you to have top-level data expertise without needing to hire or retain talent.

Solution as a Service (SolaaS): A new option for expert data analysis

You’re already familiar with Software as a Service (SaaS).

Not too long ago, if you wanted high-powered software, you invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into buying and installing a software program (and possibly mandatory hardware), spent a ton of time training your employees to use the software, and then ... you were stuck with that investment, whether the supplier bothered to update/improve it or not.

SaaS revolutionized the software market by offering immediate access to a program at a relatively low, monthly rate. With this new paradigm, companies didn’t need a large chunk of free capital to start utilizing new software, and if they didn’t like the service down the road, they were free to change services at any time without having to make massive new expenditures.

SaaS represents a big step forward in the software industry, but today, we’ve taken another significant step.

Solution as a Service (SolaaS) goes one step further, addressing the problem so many companies have with their high-powered software.

How do we harness this software’s full potential?

In the world of data analysis, as we’ve already discussed, you CAN’T. Without expert analysis, you will never be able to utilize your data analytics programs.

Solution as a Service adds that crucial element of expert analysis to the SaaS model.

By combining data analytics software with the services of an expert, experienced team, you get all the benefits of having an in-house data-science team without the costs or hassle of finding and retaining top talent.