When it comes to business data and business intelligence, no one wants to get caught by surprise. If you are missing data, or if you don’t have the ability to get a 360° view of your data, you just know you are going to miss something and that something will probably be very important.
The term ‘Advanced Analytics’ can seem daunting to the average business user and even to the average business enterprise but the process is not as complex as it may seem.
Advanced Analytics is comprised of numerous sophisticated analytical techniques, designed to parse, explore and analyze data and produce results to support business decisions. Fortunately, today’s new self-serve business intelligence solutions allow for ease-of-use, bringing together these varied techniques in a simple interface with tools that allow business users to utilize advanced analytics without the skill or knowledge of a data scientist, analyst or IT team member. Advanced Analytics provides a 360 degree view of data from data marts, data warehouses, best-of-breed, legacy systems and other data sources. The analytical techniques and algorithms are designed to identify patterns and trends, pinpoint issues and the root cause of these issues and allow the enterprise to capitalize on opportunities and accurately plan for the future.
Assisted Predictive Modeling, Predictive Analytics. Those terms strike terror in the hearts of most business users, and that is understandable. These mysterious-sounding terms sound complicated and lead business users to imagine confounding, confusing algorithms, and endless strings of numbers.
The client is located in India and has been in business for nearly thirty (30) years. Its core business is the rental of IT hardware and equipment and support services for that equipment. The client has seven locations across India and employs more than 200 team members supporting customers across India. The client wished to develop a new application to support a multi-tenant architecture and sell the application as a solution to other companies in the rental business. The existing application was not scalable, and it was missing core components and architecture to support multi-tenant use.
Your enterprise and business users do not have the time or the inclination to sift through complex data or wade through instructions to learn how to use complicated business intelligence or advanced analytics tools. They don’t want to document requirements and wait for IT or analysts to produce a report (only to find out that the data is incomplete or that the data was delivered too late to make a confident decision).
The world of business analytics has changed dramatically in the past few years. If your business is looking to upgrade BI tools or to begin implementing an analytics solution, the solution must be user friendly for business users. The tools exist today for augmented analytics, augmented data discovery, self-serve data preparation and other features and modules that provide sophisticated functionality and algorithms in an easy-to-use dashboard and environment that is designed to support business users, as well as data scientists and IT staff.
Whether your market is local or global, the business world is competitive and you can’t afford a misstep in the market. Technology is the underpinning of productivity and workflow, so if you are using software, you will need skilled software development and a service provider that can assist with integration, infrastructure support, and other technology initiatives. While your IT team may be very skilled, if your organization is like most, IT is sorely strained for resources and they are trying to do everything from producing custom reports to maintaining networks and hardware and creating custom apps that serve users.
I attended a conference where my colleagues were arguing over the benefits of hybrid, cross-platform mobile applications vs. true native mobile applications. For my part, I stayed silent and just listened. In my mind, there is no one right answer. The choice really depends on what you want to do and PLAN to do in the future, and on your performance requirements. Like many technology topics, there are way too many factors to consider for a short blog post like this one but a few things do come to mind.
Have you ever noticed that when you give someone something, they often want more? This is especially true when they really like what you gave them! As the concept of business analytics becomes more main stream and business users embrace the possibilities, they (and their managers) want and expect even more tools and more potential. They want better solutions. BUT, don’t make the mistake of interpreting the need for more sophistication and detail as a need for more complexity. Business users are still business users and, as organizations pursue the natural progression of business analytics, the emergence of Advanced Data Discovery enables those same business users to enjoy the benefits of more sophistication, more possibilities and more data sharing without the need for IT staff or data scientist involvement.
