By far the top benefit of working with an outside organization is speed, said a number of people.

"The pros of outsourcing are clear -- you can get the results faster, and don't have to hire hard-to-find and expensive data scientists," Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, an analytics and data mining consultant and editor of KDnuggets, said in an email. Outsourcing "could be entirely appropriate for smaller companies or companies where data is not the main focus or gives them competitive advantage," he said.

A subtler advantage of using an outsider is the chance to examine the data with fresh eyes, without old assumptions or bad habits. "People internally look at the data same way, and it’s sometimes harder to step back, to walk away from history and process and comps," said Brooke Niemiec, divisional VP of customer relationship marketing and loyalty at JCPenney in a phone interview.

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