This is the era of stiff commercial competition among organizations, which must constantly strive to remain on top or fizzle out as a has-been. Today, organizations are using every available means to topple other organizations out of the business. Evaluating internal performance and efficiency can benefit greatly from the use of statistical analysis to identify key areas of development along with success factors. In addition, academics can employ a statistical consulting service to support their academic pursuits including theses, dissertations, term papers and much more. Typically the ideal statistics consulting service is one that is open with communication and provides innovative ideas on how to improve performance. The focus should be not on measurement, but also on interpretation.
In universities, a statistics consulting service can help tremendously in improving the output from research activities. Universities and colleges act as the source of new knowledge in our society and for these universities, the vast array of research projects can sometimes become overwhelming, especially when managing the projects on strict schedules and budgets is required. Frequently, graduate students hire a statistical consulting service to help them interpret the data that they have collected for theses and dissertations either because they don’t have time to do so or they just don’t have the expertise that they need to get a good grade. In addition, a number of students outside the area of statistics, say in medicine, are preparing theses or dissertations that require statistical analysis of large amounts of data. Frequently, such students have no clue as to what methods to use to answer their research questions, much less actually carry them out.
However, be it telecommunications, financial services, research or marketing, nearly every entity can benefit from a statistics consulting service as it helps bring in not only expertise, but also a real world perspective as well as the benefit of an outsider’s bias-free opinion. There may be a generic statistics consulting service or a specialized one. The suitability of one versus the other depends on the needs of the specific project. For instance, a statistics consulting service may specialize in solutions for financial services. This may be due to the team’s education orientation or experience, or simply their core area of expertise. At other times, a statistics consulting service will be more generic, and able to provide holistic solutions to most industry verticals.
It is pretty much essential that the statistics consulting service in question must have required knowledge and expertise in various statistical methodologies and packages. At the same time, the statistics consulting service must exhibit a strong offering in terms of quantitative aspects such as professionalism, attention to detail, the ability to listen to and understand client requirements in detail and so on.
Producing output is one thing, converting it into meaningful decisions another. Be it a student or a CEO of a large corporation, the key difference between an average and great statistics consulting service is the ability to make sense out of large amounts of data.
In choosing a statistics consulting service, emphasize open exchange of information. Besides the requisite qualifications of the team, including atleast one Ph.D qualified statistician, the team members must possess the requisite knowledge and experience in dealing with real world problems. For research clients, designing experiments, carrying out surveys, data cleansing are also critical components. Particularly at the academic level, it is important to ensure that the students’ original intention is kept intact and the individual flavor of the dissertation is maintained.
