Patrick Boily works on an equation for the United Way.
A new centre located at Carleton University is helping businesses around Ottawa make educated decisions based on facts, math and statistics.
The Centre for Quantitative Analysis and Decision Support opened last month and is offering Carleton mathematicians and science staff for hire to help businesses analyze and compare data in order to avoid leaving big decisions to chance.
“Often a company will base strategic decisions on a gut feeling and experience of course, but we help the client analyze their current situation based on their own data, and sometimes come up with answers to questions they didn’t even know they had,” says Patrick Boily, the centre’s managing consultant.
He explains that the centre is hoping to be the interpreters between mathematicians and businesses.
“Basically, you have to learn a completely new language to understand mathematics. So we analyze the data, being either records or reports or whatever the company can provide, and we give the client answers in a language they can understand,” says Boily.
One of the organizations that already used the services provided by the centre is the United Way.
Paul Totten, national director of business and technology solutions for the United Way, says the rapidness and capability of the centre was one of the keys to hiring them.
“We’re in the middle of building a 10-year strategic direction for the United Way movement in Canada and our deadline was very short. We were very happy that the centre could help us.”
Totten explains they hired the centre to study fundraising data from 112 United Way organizations from across the country for the period of 2003 to 2011 to help identify trends and major motivating factors for fundraising in Canada.
“It is much more than plotting things on a graph, this is actually running statistical formulas and tests against the data to really prove where the changes are. We don’t have the skillset to do that ourselves,” Totten says.
Detecting the underlying trend in a dataset is an important part of what the centre can help businesses with, Boily explains.
“I’m a mathematician so I like to see math used for good. Here at Carleton we can actually help people with everyday problems instead of just using textbook examples.”
The centre’s fees depend on the size of the project. A joint initiative of the Faculty of Science and the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University, the centre has access to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
“We want to provide (the students) with experience so they can one day go out into the real world and say they have a degree in mathematics or statistics but also have experience with solving real world problems,” says Boily.