Analytic Strategies
world, the mere perception of an inadequate security posture can violate consumer trust, dilute product value and irrevocably tarnish the corporate brand and image. To enhance protection, hospitality leaders must adopt data driven solutions. Needed are analytics strategies to proactively detect fraud and often more costly, bad business exposures.
The Gap Hospitality security programs focus heavily on traditional security disciplines such as facilities, employee and customer protection — and with good reason. Geopolitical, socioeconomic and terrorism events test security programs daily. If customers don’t feel safe, the property and potentially the brand could be doomed for failure. To maximize protection, chief auditors and chief security officers — like their CIO and CMO counterparts — must change and proactively adapt to electronic threats. Adopting a data driven culture and deploying fraud analytics strategies will enhance protection, uncover valuable intelligence, discern trends and provide a holistic view of fraudulent and bad business behavior. Overseeing global operations puts an incredible drain on resources and limits the ability for hospitality security and audit teams to focus on new technologies, let alone analytics and innovation. Many hospitality security and audit departments still rely on tips, complaints or the geopolitical event of the day to determine where to focus departmental resources. Certainly insights can be gained by this approach; however, without a dedicated, data-focused team, innovation and new discoveries are often overlooked.
The Foundation: A Data Driven Culture I have been fortunate to lead and be a part of teams that deploy analytics
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strategies. We experience phenomenal results, saving millions of dollars and achieving ROI up to 100 percent. With each deployment news exposures, such as a multi-million dollar e-commerce attack, are discovered. The savings, ROI and new discoveries didn’t happen because they had “a guy.” Nor did they invest in a magical analytics tool that plugged in, turned on and produced a report. There is no one tool that tells them where to look and where the greatest exposures are. These results are achieved because the companies and teams were not afraid to change. They adopted a data driven culture. In my experience a data driven culture consists of the following basic elements: Executive buy in — not required, but it’s certainly nice to have. It always helps when your CEO understands and is willing to invest in technology. A robust technology team — don’t sell yourself short here. Plan on your data landscape growing with new sales and marketing programs and technologies. Easily accessible data — practice data governance up front. With sound architecture, secure and normalized data, analytical answers are efficiently realized. A dedicated analytics team — create an analytics team focused on finding enterprise fraud and bad business practices. If you don’t, you’re relying on “the guy” or the already overburdened technology department. The freedom to explore — If you think it has value, whether fraud or bad business, go for it. This freedom to test and develop theories and ideas gives birth to new innovation and uncovers fraud and bad business exposures.
The Strategy: Fraud Analytics Fraud analytics is the proactive
detection of previously undetectable fraud and bad business practices through data analysis and profile development. Deploying a fraud analytics strategy using your company’s existing data sources is a great place to start. If your security or audit department is still operating in the exception report, data dark ages without a team dedicated to enterprise fraud analytics, it’s never too late to change. To deploy a fraud analytics strategy, you must have a team — not just “a guy.” The team is dedicated to finding global fraud and bad business exposures. That’s right, you won’t be one-dimensional anymore looking exclusively for fraud. Use analytics to find costly bad business practices too. The analytics team will investigate, perform analysis to determine global exposure and work with stakeholders to mitigate the issue. They will work with technology to develop compliance solutions to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Innovation: Finding the Needle What’s your company’s greatest exposure? You probably haven’t found it yet. It starts as an idea, or something seen during analysis that doesn’t make sense. It might be fraud or bad business. You won’t be sure until you load a small subset of new data or join tables from five different data marts to test and prove your theory. This leave-no-holisticstone-unturned philosophy is how innovation is driven and powers fraud analytics. In my experience, companies that adopt a data driven culture and deploy a fraud analytics strategy gain new analytics insights. They identify previously undetectable fraud and bad business practices. These companies possess the ultimate analytics prize — identify unknown exposures and mitigate them.