comScore

Introduction
- Developed a proprietary, patent-protected technical platform
- Hired & developed a global workforce w/ various levels of data science abilities
- Provided on-demand software, real-time analytics & custom solutions to help
clients understand their digital customer relationships
- Measured digital consumer behavior to answer questions

It’s All About the Big Data

- 14 petabytes of online data collected real time from around the world
o Panel data
o Census data
o Perceptual data
o From strategy partners
- UDM methodology: take the data collected, panel-based data & census-based
data & combine the two to come out with a reliable set of metrics of visitation per
website
- Quality Assurance team

Building an Efficient Platform

- Services-oriented architecture
o Greenplum: parallel processing database for event level analysis
o Greenplum enterprise deata warehouse
o MapR’s Hadoop

Hiring and Developing the Elusive Data Scientist

- Hire analytical people primarily from university business schools & math
programs & give them more analytics training: comScore university training
program
- Establishing groups across the company that had a continuum of skills
- Matrix organizational structures to bring together people with diverse skillsets
o Important for the product development process

Delivering Insights that Drive Client Action

- Encouraged clients to focus on answering a few key questions and then to iterate
- Software tools w/ graphical interfaces which incorporated visualization
techniques & dashboards
- Supported self service through extensive use of wizards & template reports
- Created knowledge portals to support knowledge sharing
 - Designed an “experience” group: understand what the user flows need to be as
people try to understand the problems that they need solutions for, provide
insights that are easy to digest through new metrics or visualization

Ensuring Long-term Success

- Pervasive client usage of comScore products and services that delivered
business value for clients
- Client retention, product & service usage, up-selling

1. What did comScore do to help its client “consume” its products and services?

comScore aimed to provide on-demand software, real-time analytics and custom

solutions to help its clients understand their digital customer relationships. They
drove client action by encouraging its customer to focus on answering key
questions and then to iterate. They also provided software tools with graphical
interfaces which incorporated visualization techniques and dashboards. Other
than that, the company supported self-service through extensive use of wizards
and template reports. To further encourage product usage, comScore also
created knowledge portals to support knowledge sharing and designed an
“experience” group to understand what the user flows needed to be as people
tried to understand the problems that they needed solutions for. They strove to
provide insights that were easy to digest through new metrics or visualization.

2. What steps are necessary to bridge the gap between collecting data and creating
insights that organizations will act upon?

To bridge the gap between collecting data and creating insights that
organizations will act upon, important questions must be combined to subject
them to the data analytics platform. The organizations must understand what are
they tracking and what their end objectives are, so then they will be able to
analyze the collected data clearly. During this process, the interaction between
the organization and its platform is critical. After data is collected, aesthetically-
pleasing and clear visualizations must be created to convey the message and
articulate a specific data story to turn them into actionable insights. Turning data
into valuable business insights within a timeframe is also an vital aspect in
bridging the gap. Due to fast-changing market, the need for accurate and fast
insights for competitive advantage has never been more urgent. Business
intelligence, that incorporates the systematic elements, such as reporting,
analytics, intelligence, and strategy, is also useful for turning collected data to
valuable insights.