What did we do about planning and forecasting in the past? Well, a lot of what we did was based on guesswork. We might look at historical data and plan for growth that was unrealistic because it did not reflect the competitive market growth or the advent of online competition.
This might be a strange comparison but let me make it anyway! Think of data agility and data quality like a tight rope act. The tightrope walker is thinking about getting to the other side without falling. The audience wants to see grace and beauty during the process. They want to see a QUALITY act. In the case of the tightrope walker and the audience, they sometimes have very different goals.
Advanced Analytics Software, Data Discovery Tools and Smart Visualization can improve your planning and forecasting process, and empower your organization. The Smarten Business Intelligence environment provides advanced analytics tools that are simple enough for business users and sophisticated enough to mash-up and manage data for optimal analysis, and flexible reporting.
If your organization is implementing self-serve business intelligence, it is important to balance sophisticated tools with the skills of the average business user. While algorithms and advanced data analysis are a great benefit, if business users find these tools daunting, they won’t adopt them, and you won’t improve productivity, or timeliness or accuracy of decision-making.
Complex BI tools are not suitable for the self-serve environment. These tools are meant only for programmers and data scientists. To empower business users and allow them to achieve goals and contribute to the bottom line, you provide advanced analytics and smart data visualization tools in an easy-to-use environment that encourages user adoption and report and data sharing.
Nearly every organization has BI tools, but not every organization takes the Smarten approach to business intelligence. The components of the Smarten approach include self-serve data preparation and Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis, both of which (when combined with Smart Visualization and Advanced Data Discovery tools) provide a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, solution that supports business users and data scientists alike.
If you are frustrated with BI tools, and looking for self-service Advanced Analytics to achieve your goals and empower users, you should understand the difference between traditional BI tools and the Smarten Advanced Data Discovery approach. The Smarten Advanced Data Discovery gives users the freedom to leverage data beyond simple visual data analysis and dashboards.
In this white paper, we will discuss the emergence and importance of Citizen Data Scientists and the role of self-serve data preparation, smart data visualization and plug n’ play predictive analysis in transforming business users into Citizen Data Scientists. The wise organization must establish a data environment that integrates data from disparate sources, and presents sophisticated, yet easy-to-use tools that will lead business users in the right direction with tools that offer recommended report presentations and visualization formats and clearly identify trends and patterns to mitigate bad data assumptions and interpretations.
