A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Chris Mazzei, Global Chief Analytics Officer, EY.
Two years ago, EY went through a Chairman and CEO succession and a major global strategy refresh (dubbed internally as "Vision 2020"). It was clear to all involved in this process that data and analytics was at the center of its client service proposition and that would only increase over time. What followed was a firm wide $500 million commitment to building EY’s data and analytics capabilities. The person at the center of that transformation was EY’s then Americas Chief Strategy Officer, now newly focused as the firm’s first Global Chief Analytics Officer, Chris Mazzei.
“I was leading the strategy function for EY and so was very involved with different aspects of the Vision 2020 development process. As a part of that effort, we launched a project to look across our various businesses globally to assess the current state of our analytics capabilities and determine what else was needed to enhance our service offerings, further differentiate ourselves and build new businesses,” says Mazzei.
After several months of research, Mazzei found that each of the businesses were wrestling with similar challenges and therefore similar opportunities in terms of how they scaled the analytics-related activity. Collectively they asked the questions of whether they had the right technology, infrastructure tools and operating model in place? Did they have enough of the right competencies? What do the skills and profile look like for an analytics professional? How was analytics going to change sources of value creation and revenue models for EY? It was determined that the various businesses were all in different stages of building out the capabilities that were going to be required to have analytics be a major part of the business over the next few years.
“On the flipside, from an external market perspective, we found out we were also the best secret when it came to what were already formidable analytics capabilities. We had not really talked about it externally. I don't think you could even find analytics on EY.com, and that was a symptom of the broader issue. We agreed that building the EY brand in analytics was a key priority,” says Mazzei.
From an organization model perspective, EY decided that a global analytics center of excellence (COE) should focus on several key areas to support each of the businesses. Mazzei says that the core mission of the Global Analytics COE is to expand the firm’s direct-to-market analytic services and transform existing core services through the use of analytics. The analytics "business" at EY will be roughly $1.6 billion at the end of this fiscal year, with about 4,000 people. EY decided to leave most of its analytics delivery capability in the individual business units. Mazzei says, “we are not competing on the basis of a standalone analytics practice, but rather on the strength of the insights we can bring through analytics in all of our businesses.”
“I was asked to take the role partly because I have an analytics background by both academic training as well as consulting experience. But also, because I was in the strategy role, it afforded me the benefit of having strong working relationships with many of the senior leaders in each of the EY businesses. That organizational learning curve and ability to get things done was a critical requirement of the role.” says Mazzei. The EY Global Analytics COE has a small core of dedicated staff, but also an extended team that is significantly larger.
Acquisitions and alliances have been a key part of the growth strategy. In the past four years, the firm has made 20 analytics-related acquisitions. Those deals brought about 1,000 people and $200 million worth of revenue to the firm. They were typically done not because of just adding capacity to the business, but because the acquisition target had unique IP in a particular sector or domain that could be leveraged quickly across the EY platform.
Just this last April, EY closed one of its largest data and analytics focused deals in Asia-Pacific when it acquired C3, which had 120 people and $30 million in revenue this fiscal year,. “The acquisition significantly increased the capacity and capabilities of our analytics business in Asia Pacific. It was the right deal, right time, good cultural fit, and a chance to really scale the business in this critically important market,” says Mazzei.
The third area of Mazzei’s focus is on IP and solution development. “We are evolving from a model that was almost entirely be-spoke consulting, to one that is backed by analytic-related assets often embodied in a piece of enterprise-grade software that is either used as a tool by our practitioners, or sold directly to clients. We have built a development team in the COE that works with the business units to build those types of assets. It includes both onshore, high-end data science experts, as well as an offshore development team in India,” says Mazzei.
Mazzei is also overseeing the firm’s standardization of technology and tools, building a global technology platform and operating model that enables EY’s businesses to deploy analytics in a cost effective manner. Mazzei said, “We believe in a globally consistent technology framework that allows scale and consistency, while allowing for local innovation and market dictated flexibility.” As a result, they’ve shifted a lot of analytics-related technology budget out of the businesses to the oversight of the COE so that it could enforce a level of standardization where they thought there was a business case to doing so.
Training is also a big part of the COE agenda. “We have gone through a robust process to codify what a competency profile for an analytics practitioner looks like. The process identified some 400 different training programs that existed in pockets throughout the firm, most of which nobody knew existed, and put them underneath a common competency profile, and then created a learning portal that our 4,000 practitioners can access. This helps our analytics practioners find the right training when they need it,” says Mazzei.
Mazzei’s road to running strategy and then data and analytics for one of the world’s largest advisory professional services firms started in Port Washington, Long Island where he grew up. He went on to his undergrad degree at Cornell in Operations Research. “I was always a math geek but what I loved about operations research was the focus on applying mathematics to business decision problems. The Cornell Operations Research Program was the perfect combination, at least for me, of an engineering discipline that was pointed towards manufacturing, supply chain and finance,” says Mazzei.
After graduating, he joined a consulting firm, Kurt Salmon Associates (KSA), where he spent six years in supply chain design and performance, working with the likes of Reebok, Disney, Nike, Stride Rite, Tiffany, and Federated Department Stores. “It was a fantastic learning experience, getting into the operations of some of these market leading companies,” says Mazzei.
It also gave him insights into the lack of sophistication into how decisions were made at many of these organizations at that time and the opportunity he saw to apply more advanced analytics. “I remember being struck by that, even as a young person out of school,” says Mazzei. The experience led him to believe that he could help make a difference in decision-making, but he felt he needed a broader set of business skills to go along with his technical capabilities. This led him to get his MBA at NYU.
While in business school, he started working for EY (then known as Ernst & Young) in their Center for Strategic Transaction. “It was a group of investment bankers and strategy consultants who would run facilitated workshops and projects for CEOs and their leadership teams focused on growth strategy, typically tied to a transaction. It was an incredible crash course for me in corporate finance and corporate strategy. I learned an unbelievable amount over the two years I did that, and then joined our consulting practice,” says Mazzei. Ultimately he was asked to lead the EY strategy team in the Americas and was in that for six years prior to his latest role.
As for the future of EY’s Data and Analytics initiatives and the COE? “We believe this will be a $1.6 billion business at the end of this fiscal year and should be roughly $3 billion in 2020. But even this understates the importance of analytics to EY. We will also transform many of our core services through the use of analytics, and there is no business more important than Audit. The most far reaching component of the audit transformation program we have underway is the commitment to make a step change in the audit approach by fully embedding data analytics into our audit methodology, process and tools.. To be at the center of all that in an organization the size and scale of ours is really exciting,” says Mazzei.
