Item: IBM SPSS Statistics
Rating: 8
Author: Nicholas Baldocchi

Overall Satisfaction with IBM SPSS

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM SPSS is being used by our analytics department to analyze consumer survey data on emotional connection to drive business decisions. We use it to prepare data for analysis and the analysis itself. We heavily utilize ctables, correlations and regressions to understand what customer segments look like and what is driving their purchasing behavior.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The ability to save the syntax used for a particular data preparation or analysis is great because it saves you so much time and effort from having to perform the same work over and over again.
The feature of the syntax that was used appearing in the output file when using the interface to perform an analysis is also great to have in that it saves you a lot of headache when trying to find out how to perform a certain function. If you don't know the syntax command for it, just do it through the interface drop down menus and the syntax is generated for you and you can edit it from there.
The customization of the ctables function is awesome because you have the choice of structuring your table exactly how you need it.

Cons

A drawback of IBM spss is that the errors reported are sometimes hard to decipher in order to solve the problem. I have personally had to google errors that have come up and found a solution from a forum which was explained much better than from IBM spss.
Another drawback of IBM spss is that it doesn't do well with more complex aggregation needs. The data has to stay in the same form and can only change by adding more variables or changing the ones already there.

Return on Investment

I can't really expand much on the ROI of IBM spss as it was already in use when I came to my job but I can say that it definitely saves the analytics team time and extra effort because we can go back and reuse and repurpose old syntax instead of recreating it every time.

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop

Likelihood to Recommend

I'd say that IBM SPSS is well suited for people who have a good fundamental understanding of data analysis and the techniques commonly used. It also helps if you have some experience with any type of computer code when working with the syntax. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone fairly new to data analysis because it is hard to visually see what you are doing to the data outside of the reports.

Comments

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A catchy SPSS review title!!

Modules Used