Our analysts - Lynn Allan

What’s your role at Sumerian?

My role as a Client Delivery Analyst involves working on a variety of recurring analysis reports that we provide to our clients. The ongoing nature of this analysis helps our clients to build upon their optimisation and capacity planning efforts month-by-month by gaining a running view of service consumption, capacity and performance.

What type of analytics have you been working on recently?

I recently worked as part of the Sumerian team on an analysis project for a large professional services company who was implementing a major ERP initiative. As result of the new deployment, the project also involved rationalising a number of legacy applications. The analysis we carried out was extensive and focussed on all of stages of the initiative’s deployment - from right-sizing the service through to monitoring its uptake and usage across the business. You can read the full case study here

Part of my work involved using our IT consumption analytics and scenario modelling to forecast the expected levels of helpdesk calls post the go live. These forecasts helped the client to not only right-size helpdesk provisioning, but also keep track of issues arising from the new service and take proactive, intervening action on areas that needed it.

Can you tell us more about IT consumption analytics?

As with all the analytics we provide, IT consumption models real data captured from an organisation’s underlying systems and business data. It’s an analytical technique that allows us to mine intelligence about who, how, what and where are using IT services. By understanding IT consumption profiles, organisations can improve alignment, tailoring services to better, and more efficiently, support different user groups. This more fine-tuned approach has a number of benefits from reducing costs and targeting future investment, to improving productivity and optimising team working.

How is it different to traditional methods of optimising service provision?

Typically, many companies take a broad brush approach to the provisioning of IT services and facilities, giving general access to applications and services across large user groups within their company. In contrast, our approach captures and data mines actual IT service consumption (access of applications and technology types), facilities usage (from swipe card and telecommunications data), and service support requirements (from helpdesk usage) to discover clusters and patterns around employee behaviour – this can all be sliced and diced by geography, business division , function or role, etc. All of this enables us to produce detailed consumption profiles that help our clients tailor both their IT and facilities to various groups of users across the business.

This style of analysis, though new to many IT groups, is used extensively by sales and marketing groups within major supermarkets and online retailers - where, for example, loyalty card data is mined to understand buying patterns of shoppers, and used to help marketers identify valuable customers and target products more effectively. In much the same way, our clients are using this analysis to unlock the picture of their company’s working behaviour and so optimise their IT investments and delivery.

Tell us about your background and interests?

Previous to joining Sumerian in 2007, I studied Business Studies at Glasgow Caledonian and worked in the energy sector for 5 years, during which I studied for an MSc in Economic Management and Policy. I maintain a professional interest in the economics of the energy industry and its related environmental impact – there are a lot of synergies here with IT and the growing concerns about its energy requirements. You can read some of my thoughts on this in the Sumerian blog