Last spring, I completed my second and final co-op during my time at Northeastern at a well-known consulting firm in downtown Boston. My role as a “Consulting Data Analyst” was a relatively new role in which I was tasked with completing projects for various teams within the business. Essentially, I was an internal consultant for the firm. Although internal consulting in this setting was not focused on the technology the business used, it still required much of the elicitation and analysis work information scientists use when developing their projects. In fact, when discovering more about what information scientists do, how they organize systems and gather information, the transferable skills into the consulting field were strikingly obvious. Both fields are tasked with solving complex problems and developing a solution at the minimal costs possible.
Firstly, elicitation is essential in order to understand the needs of the teams I was working with. The problems I worked on ranged from trying to figure out how to increase retention to setting up a user-friendly Excel model so they could track their own data over time to simple monthly reporting. Each team had specific needs that had to be met in order for our work to make a meaningful contribution to their daily processes. However, our elicitation techniques were relatively stale when comparing what we used to the many options true information scientists implement. Although some aren’t always applicable, such as using observation for estimating employee engagement, there are several collaborative and investigative techniques that we could have also applied. For example, we used interviews with the team we were working with frequently, but we never thought to brainstorm a possible solution with that team. Engaging them in the brainstorm process could have helped us reach a further understanding of what they were looking for and ultimately saved us time down the line with transferring knowledge between the two groups more efficiently. Our most frequently used technique was surveys. As a large portion of topics we worked on involved employee sentiments regarding particular programs or teams, surveys were the easiest way to get feedback as they were anonymous. However, we certainly suffered from selection bias as we were unable to mandate the survey to everyone. Despite this, we still reached an average of 80% completion for each office, which was better than expected. With our techniques we were able to perform data analytics, so we never delved into the same type of analysis information scientists use when they look at the processes they created.
Another aspect of information science frequently used in consulting is the SECI model. A huge part of my job was meeting with the different teams in order to figure out what data analysis issue or general problem they were experiencing. Therefore, how to internalize knowledge was essential to be able to solve each problem. There were plenty of resources available within the firm, and the primary way to discover everything that was available to my team was socialization. Meeting with consultants or other subject matter experts as well as attending informational sessions that discussed new ideas or techniques for different business needs helped in opening my mind to tackle problems in new, unique ways.
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