Predictive Analytics Supports Citizen Data Scientists!

Use Predictive Analytics for Fact-Based Decisions

Like every other business, your organization must plan for success. In order to do this, the team must have a dependable plan and be able to forecast results and create reasonable objectives, goals and competitive strategies. These plans and forecasts will support investment in technology, appropriate resources and hiring strategies, additional locations, products, services and marketing strategies, partnerships and other components of business management to ensure success.

Forecasting and planning cannot be based on opinions or guesswork. It must be based on historical data, facts and clear insight into trends and patterns in the market, the competition and customer buying behavior. To accomplish these goals, businesses are using predictive modeling and predictive analytics software and solutions to ensure dependable, confident decisions by leveraging data within and outside the walls of the organization and analyzing that data to predict outcomes in the future.

‘Every industry, business function and business users can benefit from predictive analytics.’

According to CIO publications, the predictive analytics market was estimated at $12.5 billion USD in 2022 and is expected to reach $38 billion USD by 2028.

Predictive Analytics is Beneficial for Every Industry and Business Function

Predictive analytics encompasses techniques like data mining, machine learning (ML) and predictive modeling techniques like time series forecasting, classification, association, correlation, clustering, hypothesis testing and descriptive statistics to analyze current and historical data and predict future events, results and business direction.

When a business selects predictive analytics tools that are suitable for business users and team members, it can leverage sophisticated algorithms and analytical techniques in an easy-to-use environment to enable every team member to contribute to the bottom line by allowing them to gain insight into data and use that insight to make confident, fact-based decisions.

With these tools, users can explore patterns in data and receive suggestions to help them gain insight on their own without dependence on IT or data scientists. The enterprise can provide the tools needed at every level of the organization with tools and data science for business users that are sophisticated in functionality and easy-to-use for users at every skill level.

The benefits of augmented analytics and self-serve predictive modeling include:

  • No complex algorithms or data manipulation
  • Auto-recommendations for algorithms to explore underlying data
  • No advanced data science skills required
  • Analyze, share, collaborate and optimize business potential
  • Business users can prototype and hypothesize without professional assistance
  • Recommend optimal actions to achieve specific goals

Every industry, business function and business users can benefit from predictive analytics. Here are some examples of the use of predictive modeling:

Retail – Predictive Analytics tools can be used to understand customer buying behavior and to suggest products and product bundling based on previous purchases, buying patterns, and demographics. This creates a more personalized and targeted shopping experience that is unique to each customer.

Supply Chain – The organization can forecast demand and manage the supply chain to optimize inventory using machine learning to predict customer demand, seasonality, product trends etc., to that the enterprise can mitigate stock shortages and avoid warehouse and inventory overstock.

Healthcare – By using historical data regarding specific diseases, conditions and treatment plans, providers can forecast treatment outcomes, limit risk and improve overall care, thereby reducing complications, readmission and provider resource, medication and hospital bed shortages.

Energy Infrastructure – Using predictive analytics allows these businesses to monitor and analyze data and performance and to detect patterns and trends that may indicate downtime, breakdowns and maintenance issues.

Financial Services, Banks and Loan Businesses – Predictive analytics provides support for credit risk and fraud mitigation and allows businesses to create scoring models for loan approval, etc. based on credit history, and other financial considerations. Predictive modeling allows the organization to identify transactions that are outside the norm, and alert the business and its customers of hacks, fraud, etc.

‘When a business selects predictive analytics tools that are suitable for business users and team members, it can leverage sophisticated algorithms and analytical techniques in an easy-to-use environment to enable every team member to contribute to the bottom line by allowing them to gain insight into data and use that insight to make confident, fact-based decisions.’

These are just some of the benefits and use cases your business can consider to decide on how best to implement predictive analytics and integrate the use of these tools into day-to-day use for business users to improve data-driven decisions and results.

To find out more about AI And Predictive AnalyticsContact Us. Keep pace with changing enterprise needs and support business agility. Let us help you realize your business goals and objectives with fact-based information, and flexible, scalable technology solutions that will support Citizen Data Scientist initiatives, and improved data literacy and data democratization.

Original Post : Predictive Analytics Supports Citizen Data Scientists!

Choose Augmented Analytics Designed for Business Users!

Avoid Complex Analytics Solutions (Your Users Will Hate)

When a business is considering a business intelligence or analytics solution, it is important to recognize that today’s solutions are very different than the solutions of the past. Not only do they include more analytical techniques and features, but they have come a long way in providing access to sophisticated analytics for the average enterprise team member.

Harvard Business Review Analytics Service reports that

a) businesses can substantially improve business performance by giving frontline workers modern self-service analytics tools to enable fast intelligent action and,

b) not all self-service analytics provide this effective approach.

Choose Augmented Analytics Designed for Business Users and Get the Most From Your Solution

The Harvard Business Review Analytics Service surveyed nearly 500 executives and found that they reported significant performance improvement when they empowered frontline workers with augmented analytics. More than one-third of those surveyed noted improvement in customer and employee engagement and in product and service quality.

While some businesses may still be using business intelligence and analytics that are designed for data scientists and IT professionals, most of those are actively working to upgrade and/or migrate to augmented analytics and solutions that are designed for self-serve business user access.

Here’s why:

  • Search-based, self-serve analytics provides swift access to data and familiar natural language processing (NLP) search capability so business users can ask a question, get an answer and drill down to discover the root cause of issues. There is no need for the user to wait for IT or a data scientist to produce a report. They can continue to work on a task or a problem with full insight into results, challenges and possibilities.
  • The enterprise can enable data democratization and data literacy across the business landscape, thereby ensuring that there is a rapid response to market and competitive changes and to changing customer buying behavior.
  • Business users can leverage their industry knowledge and functional skillset and combine data insight with experience to produce the best results.
  • Intuitive, easy-to-use solutions help to combat user resistance and ensure user adoption. While there are always cultural issues surrounding this type of adoption and the perceived changes in responsibilities, when business users see the value of having crucial information at their fingertips, the enterprise can ease the transition and ensure user adoption.
  • No matter the role of the user, the team can enjoy the benefits of augmented analytics and make the transition to Citizen Data Scientists to improve collaboration, data sharing and fact-based decision-making.
  • The business can understand quality and maintenance issues, refine customer targeting and marketing optimization, and make appropriate financial investments, and they can analyze trends and patterns and make forecasts and predictions.
  • When the enterprise adopts these tools and techniques, they allow Citizen Data Scientists to perform analytics on a day-to-day basis and, where appropriate to effectively interact with and collaborate with the IT team and data scientists to refine data and prepare it for more strategic initiatives, so there is a seamless handoff from the business user to the analytical community, when and as necessary.

When the business is ready to acquire augmented analytics or to upgrade from existing, more restrictive solutions designed for professional analytical resources, it is important to choose the right solution – one with sophisticated tools that are presented in an intuitive user interface with auto-suggestions and recommendations to assist business users, and ample personalization of dashboards and reports.

With the right IT consulting partner, you can select and implement an Augmented Analytics Solution with business intelligence (BI) and advanced capabilities, and ensure that every user can leverage these tools, no matter their skillset or technical capabilities. Explore our free white paper, ‘A Roadmap To ROI And User Adoption Of Augmented Analytics And BI Tools.’

Augmented Analytics Must Provide Data Quality and Insight!

How Can I Ensure Data Quality and Gain Data Insight Using Augmented Analytics?

There are many business issues surrounding the use of data to make decisions. One such issue is the inability of an organization to gather and analyze data. These enterprises will typically focus on building a team of data scientists or business analysts to help with this task OR they might take on an augmented analytics initiative to provide access to data and analytics for their business users. This is where businesses will often face a second issue; namely that the analytics solution they choose is not designed to easily and quickly provide insight into data and to ensure data quality.

Key Influencer Analytics Tells You How to Succeed!

Use Key Influencer Analytics to Understand What Factors Impact Success!

Suppose you are trying to understand why a marketing campaign is failing, or what factors cause your customers to buy your services again. What if you need to know whether the color of a product affects the number of units sold in a particular country or area of a country? There are so many variables and components that can affect business success, and understanding the relationship among all the factors of success can seem like a guessing game.

When you are faced with this quandary, it is wise to use analytics to take the guesswork out of the equation. But how do you begin to analyze all the factors at play?

‘Can an augmented analytics tools tell you what algorithm or analytical technique to use? Can it help you understand the relationships of various factors and issues and determine what changes will help you improve the revenue for a product, or help you create a new service package?’

Statistical and analytical experts will tell you that there are three primary factors that can help you decide on the metrics to use for your analysis:

  • The type of data you want to analyze – Understanding the data type can help you decide whether you need to consider a binary approach or look at categories, etc.
  • The character of the data you want to analyze – Are you looking at product attributes, a specific threshold or data range, etc.
  • What you want to accomplish with your analysis – Do you want to identify trends or patterns or are you trying to understand the relationships among the various factors and which factors affect success?
Key Influencer Analytics Helps You Understand Success

…and there is one more critical issue you must consider. Namely, who is doing the analysis? If you want to democratize data and improve data literacy across your enterprise, you will want your business users to understand and use analytical tools. But your team members are not statisticians or data scientists. So, they will need easy-to-use augmented analytics tools.

But can an augmented analytics tools tell you what algorithm or analytical technique to use? Can it help you understand the relationships of various factors and issues and determine what changes will help you improve the revenue for a product, or help you create a new service package?

One of the most frustrating tasks a business user has in analytics is finding and gathering the right data for analysis and ensuring that all factors, variables and data that may affect the outcome of the analysis is included. Depending on the size of the dataset a user selects, there may be hundreds or thousands of variables, and business users often find it difficult to identify the rights ones. Yet without the ability to identify the right variables, the business is likely to measure and attend to the wrong things.

That’s where Key Influencer Analytics comes into play! This approach puts the power and clarity of targeted analytics in the hands of business users and support Citizen Data Scientist initiatives and the critical goals of Data Literacy across the organization.

The user can simply point to the dataset they want to analyze and the system will identify the target and the influencers or predictors that will affect the target, along with its impact and it provides crucial metrics such as mean, outliers, and others and identifies relationship and distribution among variables. The system will auto-suggest relationships and present distribution and impact using the most appropriate visualization.

Users enjoy interactive features that allow them to see and explore other combinations and impacts and can select target and predictors, and use them for models, reports or KPIs. Key Influencer Analytics empowers every business user and allows them quickly select and target data to achieve results without the assistance of a data scientist, IT professional or analyst.

Key Influencer Analytics will:

  • Identify feature importance based on machine learning algorithms
  • Interpret insights in simple language
  • Measure statistics
  • Reveal influencers with impact on the target
  • Auto recommend influencers
  • Identify data relationships with interactive visualization

With these tools, business users can identify what matters most within the data, and how the various factors and relationships impact success, and they can understand the interdependence of variables and leverage auto-suggestions and machine learning functionality to gain insight. Users can also leverage the features within the tool to consider various combinations and the impact of those combinations on the success of the project, product or plan.

‘There are so many variables and components that can affect business success, and understanding the relationship among all the factors of success can seem like a guessing game.’

Find out how Key Influencer Analytics can benefit your business users and support Citizen Data Scientists, and how it can provide an advantage to your data scientists, business analysts and IT team members.

Why Not Embrace the Advantages of Self-Serve BI Tools?

Don’t Be Daunted by the Challenges of BI Tools. Self-Serve BI is the Answer!

Gartner research reveals that, ‘90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency.’ As business professionals, we all know that information is power and today, your business users are expected to know more and to keep pace with industry, market and customer changes that will negatively impact the business or have provide potential opportunities. But how do your team members achieve these goals when they are busier than ever, and the changes are coming more rapidly than ever!

‘Simple, self-serve BI tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your goals with features and tools like Social BI, Mobile BI, Embedded BI, etc.’

In this article, we will discuss the topic of modern business intelligence tools and solutions and the advantages of providing self-serve tools to your users for day-to-day analysis and intelligence gathering.

Let’s Discuss: Benefits and Challenges of Self-Serve BI

First, let’s look at some of the challenges you will need to consider when implementing self-serve BI tools:

Challenges of Self-Serve BI

  • Technology Access and Infrastructure Readiness – Your IT, finance and management teams will need a comprehensive understanding of your current technology and infrastructure, the data hubs, data warehouses and software solutions (legacy, best-of-breed, ERP, etc.) that will provide the foundational data for your users. You will need a plan and a roadmap to integrate these into your business intelligence strategy. A modern, seamless BI solution can provide a simple solution for what might otherwise be a challenging situation. If you can easily integrate your data sources and make them available for data gathering and analytics, your users can leverage the data to report, share and collaborate.
  • Team Member Adoption and Understanding – Your team will also need an understanding of the average technology skills of your business users and their willingness to adopt new tools and solutions. If your team members perceive that your BI tools are difficult to use, or if they are not educated on the need for and the benefits of self-serve business intelligence, they are unlikely to adopt the new tools. If, on the other hand, they see the value to their role and how it can make them more productive and streamline their work process; if they see that the solution is easy and intuitive to use, your business is less likely to face the challenges of team reluctance.

There are many other challenges and considerations that should inform your BI tools strategy, but these two are perhaps the most important.

Now, let’s consider some of the many benefits of self-serve business intelligence and how it can support your goals and simplify the lives of your business users:

Benefits of Self-Serve BI

  • Social BI – Social BI allows users to champion the use of business intelligence. Power users and those who are curious by nature will create reports, share and collaborate, using easy-to-use tools and thereby encourage others to use the tools and to repurpose report formats etc. to achieve their own goals. Social BI allows business users to share, ‘like’ and perform tasks in a way that is similar to social networking and is therefore popular among business users.
  • Mobile BI – Today’s team members often work remotely, or spend a lot of time on the road. By providing self-serve business intelligence that is intuitive to use and accessible on Android and iOS devices, the business can ensure that users will have seamless access and can accomplish tasks, search for information, share and collaborate, without missing a beat!
  • Data Democratization and Data Literacy – If you want your team members to grow and add more value, you want to encourage data literacy and ensure data democratization. Move away from restricted data access and sole ownership of analytics by data scientists, IT and business analysts. Provide easy-to-use tools that allow for simple search analytics in a Google-type environment and will make it easier for reluctant business users to embrace your new BI solution and develop new data analytics skills they can use for fact-based decisions.
  • User Adoption – There is nothing more frustrating than spending the time and money to implement a new solution, only to find that your users are resistant to using that solution. With true self-serve BI tools and intuitive data visualization, reporting, analytics and access, users will want to adopt the tools and share their discoveries with other team members.
  • Embedded BI – If you want to leverage existing technology, improve your Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for your current solutions and infrastructure, consider that self-serve BI tools can be embedded into existing solutions. With embedded BI with Integration APIs, users can leverage familiar, favorite software solutions in a single sign-on environment, and find information within those solutions without having to learn complicated new techniques or fighting with data silos and transferring data from one place to another.

There are many other advantages to Self-Serve Business Intelligence. This short list should give you some ideas of how you can leverage these tools in your own business landscape.

‘As business professionals, we all know that information is power and today, your business users are expected to know more and to keep pace with industry, market and customer changes that will negatively impact the business or have provide potential opportunities.’

Business Intelligence solutions should include tools and techniques that make it easier to achieve data literacy and provide data analytics access to all business users. Simple, self-serve BI tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your goals with features and tools like Social BI, Mobile BI, Embedded BI, etc.  Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.

Original Post : Let’s Discuss: Benefits and Challenges of Self-Serve BI!

What is Key Influencer Analytics? Do I Need it?

Key Influencer Analytics: What Is It and Why is It Important?

No matter the size of your business or in what industry your market is involved, the concept of analytics is more important today than ever before. Businesses competing locally or on a global scale are all engaged in market competition and, in order to grow and succeed, every business must understand its competitors, its own products and services, and most importantly, its customers and what products they are buying. Businesses must build and monitor and manage processes and activities, all with the goal of being the most productive and responsive in the market

Assisted Predictive Modeling is Your Secret Weapon!

Predictive Analytics That is Easy Enough for Any Business User!

Predictive analytics may seem too complex for business users but with advanced technology like machine learning and features like assisted predictive modeling users can dive into the process without the skills of an IT professional or a data scientist. Assisted predictive modeling frees the user by providing system recommendations that will suggest the right analytical technique and achieve the best fit for what the user wants to do, ensuring that they use the most appropriate algorithm for the data they wish to analyze.

Why Would I Want to be a Citizen Data Scientist?

What Does Becoming a Citizen Data Scientist Get Me?

When your enterprise turns to you to inhabit the Citizen Data Scientist role, it may (or may not) provide information on what that role is, why it is important for business users to transform into the role and exactly how the transformation will work. Online training programs, like the one mentioned in the closing lines of this article, provide information on the role, its purpose, how to collaborate with data scientists and IT, how augmented analytics solutions work and the types of analytical techniques you will be using.

Do I Really Want to be a Citizen Data Scientist?

Someone Said I’m Now a Citizen Data Scientist!  Now What?

What do you have to know to be a Citizen Data Scientist? Who is the ideal candidate to be a Citizen Data Scientist? How does the whole Citizen Data Scientist thing work, anyway?

Solve the Right Problems with Key Influencer Analytics!

Do You Know What Key Influencer Analytics Can Do For Your Business?

What matters most in your business? Don’t say everything, because there is no way you can place strategic focus on every aspect of the business and, although all of your goals and objectives should be aligned, there are, in fact, a smaller number of things hidden within your business that will impact your success if they are not attended to and that will give you the most benefit if you spend a bit more time organizing and planning activities and business processes around these things.