The Client is a state government with a population of approximately 30 million citizens, and an annual budget of $5 billion USD. This government agency focuses on implementing IT and e-governance initiatives to enhance citizen services and governance efficiency. By leveraging advanced technology, the agency aims to improve the quality of life for citizens and to streamline administrative processes across and throughout departments.
Business Intelligence (BI) is the lifeblood of an organization. Without business intelligence, the enterprise does not have an objective understanding of what works, what does not work, and how, when and where to make changes to adapt to the market, its customers and its competition.
You may be interested to know that TechJury reports seven out of ten businesses rate data discovery as very important, and that the top three business intelligence trends are data visualization, data quality management and self-service business intelligence.
As the Business Intelligence solution market evolves, it may be difficult for an organization to know when to invest in these tools, and which tools are best for enterprise and user needs.
If you are considering a Business Intelligence solution or BI tool, or if you wish to upgrade your business intelligence and reporting tools, look for a solution that has self-serve cross tabulation, or cross-tab reporting. Cross-Tab reporting reveals the relationship between two factors or targets. This analytical tool can be used for side-by-side comparisons and to compare results for one or more data points, variables, or targets.
Did you know that, by some estimates, data-driven businesses are nearly 25% more likely to acquire customers? If you can give your team easy-to-use BI tools with self-serve cross-tab reporting, you can put the power of market and customer knowledge in their hands!
‘Business Intelligence solutions with self-serve cross-tab reporting can provide an intuitive, clear method of data analysis for your business users by revealing relationships in a way that makes the results clear and helps the organization to make the best decisions.’
In this article, we discuss the value of self-serve BI tools with Cross-Tab capabilities and the benefits of this type of focus and insight.
Cross-tab reporting allows for intuitive use by business users with average technical skills, and can be beneficial for all types of business functions and industries. In an educational setting, a university or school might use cross-tab reporting to analyze teacher or course evaluations, looking at the relationship between student satisfaction and the subject, the class time, class location and other factors. Businesses can analyze team and employee satisfaction and attrition by looking at job location, benefits, the results of exit interviews, available training, and support, etc. Cross-tab reporting is frequently used in market research to analyze the various factors that relate to product or service satisfaction, including product features and options, where and how the product is sold, the sales and marketing approach, etc. A retail store owner might use cross-tab data analysis to determine customer satisfaction by looking at demographics, the gender of the person buying the product, the price of the product in a particular region, etc.
There are many ways to slice and dice data and many ways in which crucial information can hide inside that data. The self-serve cross-tab reporting approach allows business users to examine relationships among data points and factors, with more clarity and accuracy. This type of analysis provides more clarity and reveals results, interdependent relationships and factors that might otherwise be missed. Users can avoid confusion when working with data and analyze large datasets to reveal frequencies and percentages. With this information, the business can understand the ‘what if’ of the various factors and see how results would change if one factor or relationship is changed.
Self-serve cross-tab reporting simplifies analytics and allows business users to spot trends and patterns and collaborate with other team members to adapt tasks and activities to resolve issues and/or capitalize on opportunities. Using cross tabulation reporting to understand the connection and relationship between two or more factors allows the business to make a decision, with confidence. Rather than guessing the reason for declining results, increased employee attrition or other problems, the enterprise can clearly see what factors (and the relationships among factors) are the cause of a problem and how to change those factors to get better results.
‘If you can give your team easy-to-use BI tools with self-serve cross-tab reporting, you can put the power of market and customer knowledge in their hands!’
Business Intelligence solutions with self-serve cross-tab reporting can provide an intuitive, clear method of data analysis for your business users by revealing relationships in a way that makes the results clear and helps the organization to make the best decisions. By giving your team members these tools, you can leverage domain and industry knowledge and combine data analytics in a day-to-day environment without the need for assistance from data scientists or the IT staff. Self-Serve Cross-Tab reporting produces clear results that are easy to understand and can be used in staff meetings and presentations to support recommendations and help the business become more agile.
Look for seamless Business Intelligence Reporting And Flexible Tools that include self-serve Cross-Tab reporting. Provide business intelligence that your IT team can easily implement and support, and a solution that business users will want to adopt. Choose flexible, agile business intelligence solutions that can be used at all levels to collaborate, share data, and report and communicate with clarity. Self-Serve BI Tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your data democratization and user adoption goals.
Original Post : Cross-Tab Reporting Gives Business Users Insight Into Data!
When a business decides to implement a self-serve business intelligence (BI solution, it must ensure that the tools really are ‘self-serve’ and that they provide the flexibility and agility to give power users the ability to create and analyze, and business users with average technology skills the ability to quickly and easily understand the augmented analytics tools they now have access to, and to use those tools to the benefits of the team and the organization.
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.
First, let’s look at some of the challenges you will need to consider when implementing self-serve BI tools:
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:
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!
Gartner has predicted that, ‘90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency.’ Establishing the strategy is one thing, but getting business users to adopt an analytics and information-based business workflow is quite another.
‘Modern business intelligence tools that are designed with self-serve features makes it easy enough for every user (no matter their technical skill) to leverage analytics to report, share and collaborate.’
When it comes to teams, there are two things that are always true: 1) they learn a process and workflow and rarely want to change that familiar process and 2) they are always suspicious of ‘new’ initiatives and nearly always believe that these new initiatives will result in more work for them. There is a reason your team resists new processes and initiatives and that reason is simple. Usually, their fears are warranted!
So, if you want to engender support for new analytics initiatives and engage a business community in fact-based, action-oriented initiatives, you need to plan this new initiative with your users in mind.
In this article, we focus on two of the primary components of a new business user analytics initiative.
Modern business intelligence tools that are designed with self-serve features like smart data visualization, self-serve data preparation and assisted predictive modeling make it easy enough for every user (no matter their technical skill) to leverage analytics to report, share and collaborate. By adding value to the user’s everyday tasks and reducing the rework and issues they will confront, you can encourage your users to adopt analytics initiatives.
Those self-serve tools should include reporting and graphical tools that are clear and concise. Business users don’t want tools that produce complex reports filled with columns and mind-numbing numbers that do not help them reach a decision or illustrate an issue. Cross-tab analytics have been around for some time but the new, improved versions of this capability provides real insight into data in a way that is clear for every user. Sophisticated functionality is underpinned with easy-to-use tools so users can analyze the relationship between or among two or more variables and summarize data in rows and columns making it easy to understand the relationships and intersection of the various types of data. Understanding relationships in data is crucial to identifying the root cause of a problem or to targeting an issue or identifying a business opportunity. Your team members can work with multi-dimensional data and perform ad-hoc queries to gain a clear view of performance, dive into your data, and find and understand the data they need quickly and intuitively. Cross-tab analysis simplifies complex data operations, summary operations, time series functions, filters and custom column expressions and enables business users with simple tools they can really use.
‘If you want to engender support for new analytics initiatives and engage a business community in fact-based, action-oriented initiatives, you need to plan this new initiative with your users in mind.’
Business Intelligence tools can improve your business results. If your business understands the challenges of implementing a business intelligence solution and adequately plans for implementation and user adoption, it can leverage the benefits of these tools and solutions and ensure success. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.
Original Post : Enable User Adoption with Self-Serve BI and Cross-Tab Analytics!
Gartner research reveals that, ‘80% of organizations seeking to scale digital business will fail because they do not take a modern approach to data and analytics governance.’
If you are considering democratizing business intelligence gathering and analytics, you are not alone! Businesses today face more competition from local and global markets and every team member must work quickly and accurately in support of goals and objectives if the enterprise is to achieve its goals.
‘When senior executives and managers have reliable information and dependable recommendations and suggestions, they can improve performance and accuracy in forecasting, planning and demand.’
In this article, we discuss a few of the reasons a business should consider democratizing business intelligence and analytics within its team and how this type of initiative can be implemented to help your enterprise succeed.
When you provide BI tools to your business users, you democratize data and begin to build a better understanding of the root cause of problems, the opportunities the business can leverage and the way forward to solving problems and creating business success. Team members can work smarter, with quick, concise access, and insight into data via self-serve solutions that streamline and simplify the typically complex analytical process and allow every team member to perform the analysis and, more importantly, to understand what the results are telling them.
When you democratize business intelligence and analytics with augmented analytics tools, IT team members, data scientists and business analysts can focus on strategic goals and on initiatives where data must be 100% accurate. Team members can use BI tools on a daily basis to test theories and gather and analyze information to support activities and tasks, collaborate with others and move forward, so EVERYONE can focus on their own roles and core responsibilities.
When senior executives and managers have reliable information and dependable recommendations and suggestions, they can improve performance and accuracy in forecasting, planning and demand. Team leaders, business unit managers and others can realize long-term benefits and count on the fact that all team members are working with the right information, that information and analysis is based on current, integrated data and on measurable results. The organization can shift to a results-based environment where problems are analyzed and resolved and opportunities are leveraged to the greatest extent possible, so the enterprise can create an environment of continuous improvement.
When all team members are using business intelligence to test theories and hypothesize, to solve problems and get to the root of a problem, to identify those all-important ‘nuggets’ of information that make a competitive difference, managers and executives can feel confident that the team is speaking a common language and that every team members knows how to find a problem, how to explain that problem and how to dependable recommendations to solve that problem.
‘Businesses should consider democratizing business intelligence and analytics within teams to help the enterprise succeed.’
Business Intelligence tools can support data democratization and improve your business results. If your business understands the challenges of implementing a business intelligence solution and adequately plans for implementation and user adoption, it can leverage the benefits of these tools and solutions and ensure success. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.
Original Post : Should I Democratize Business Intelligence in My Business?
Gartner has predicted that ‘augmented analytics will be ubiquitous, but only 10% of users will use it to its full potential.’ Perhaps one of the most important aspects of user adoption is to provide the business intelligence tools at the place and time the user needs them. That means that a solution considered by the organization must be one that supports mobile devices.
‘The organization should look for a ‘design once, use anywhere’ approach that allows for maximum flexibility.’
In this article, we discuss how the organization can assess and choose the right Mobile BI solution to ensure optimal results and user adoption.
The augmented analytics, business intelligence solution that offers out-of-the-box mobile access for all types of mobile devices, tablets and desktops allows users to perform analytics, collaborate and report on the road, in the office, in hotels – in short, anywhere. With mobile BI support, the enterprise can provide a self-serve BI tool that encourages user adoption and supports data democratization and analytics for all team members without expensive customization or restrictive dashboards or reports. The Mobile BI solution that supports all devices and screen sizes allows users to access analytics using any device they leverage for work-related activities.
The enterprise must assess its business intelligence needs and plan for the future but not every evolutionary path is predictable. So, a Mobile BI tool that supports current and future data and user volume is an imperative. The organization should look for a ‘design once, use anywhere’ approach that allows for maximum flexibility. As devices change and evolve and users, locations and data changes, the organization can meet its needs without additional licensing or developmental costs.
If the augmented analytics solution and BI tools are comprised of comprehensive features to allow for easy-to-use dashboards, reporting, and graphs, charts and key performance indicators (KPIs), those features must be designed to seamlessly display and function on any type of device, any screen and any resolution, so users are not frustrated and access is simple and intuitive.
‘Perhaps one of the most important aspects of user adoption is to provide the business intelligence tools at the place and time the user needs them.’
Find out how Mobile BI And Augmented Analytics can support data democratization and improve your business results. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.
Original Post : Choose the Right Mobile BI App and Get Results!
Businesses that invest in business intelligence solutions expect to achieve results, become more competitive and improve productivity, but these businesses often fail to understand the need for Mobile BI. Mobile business intelligence should provide all the features and search capability a user needs to perform tasks and get information while on the road, working remotely or visiting a client, partner or regional office.
The world-renowned technology research firm, Gartner, predicts that, ‘through 2024, 50% of organizations will adopt modern data quality solutions to better support their digital business initiatives’. As businesses consider the options for data analytics, it is important to understand the impact of solution selection.
