Embed BI Within Your Enterprise Apps and Enjoy User Adoption!

If You Want Your Users to Adopt BI Tools, Embedded BI is the Way to Go!

If you are considering a business intelligence or augmented analytics solution for your business users, or if you have already invested in these tools, you will want to focus on user adoption and, to meet the expectations of your executive team and IT staff, you must ensure return on investment (ROI) and a low total cost of ownership (TCO). But user adoption is often difficult to achieve. Users are familiar with their existing tools and solutions and workflow, and humans are notoriously resistant to change!

The key to achieving your goals for user adoption, ROI and TCO is to pursue an embedded business intelligence (BI) strategy. If your team needs convincing, here are just a few statistics and results reported by organizations currently using the Embedded BI approach to analytics.

  • 67% of companies say that time spent in their applications increased after they embedded analytics
  • 85% of commercial applications are currently embedding analytics capabilities
  • 93% of application teams say that embedded analytics improves the user experience
  • 96% of application teams say embedded analytics contributes to overall revenue growth
  • …and if you are a technology company, currently selling an app, you might wish to consider the fact that 68% of commercial application teams charge more for analytics in their apps!

‘Integrating embedded analytics and BI tools within a familiar enterprise application allows users a single sign-on (SSO) experience, and puts analytical tools right at their fingertips, within their familiar applications.’

The undeniable fact is that your business users know their enterprise apps. They are familiar with the workflow and the features and the processes, and they know where to find information and how to use it within these familiar applications. They DO NOT want to use a silo application that requires them to move data around to get it into an analytical solution and then use that solution to analyze data and results, and they DEFNITELY DO NOT want to learn a complex new analytical system. So, user adoption will suffer, if you take that approach!

Can Embedded BI Improve User Adoption of Augmented Analytics?

Integrating embedded analytics and BI tools within a familiar enterprise application allows users a single sign-on (SSO) experience, and puts analytical tools right at their fingertips, within their familiar applications. If the tools are easy-to-use, your business users do not need specialized skills to successfully analyze and use data, so they can quickly and easily make fact-based decisions, and support your enterprise goals and objectives.

Here are some real benefits you can reap from using embedded BI tools:

End User Organizations – Internal IT teams can easily integrate and embed BI objects within their ERP, CRM, Intranet portal or other applications, to improve user adoption and maximize Business Intelligence ROI.

ISV and OEM Partners – Leverage Embedded BI and Integration APIs to add powerful functionality and provide access to existing ERP, SCM, HRMS, CRM or any other products and to provide analytics capabilities within existing products without major Investment. Reduce time to market and stay ahead in the competition!

‘The key to achieving your goals for user adoption, ROI and TCO is to pursue an embedded business intelligence (BI) strategy.’

You can find out more about the Smarten Embedded BI And Integration APIs solution and add powerful functionality and access to existing ERP, SCM, HRMS, CRM or any other products. Provide analytics capabilities within existing products without major Investment. Your business users and your customers will appreciate the ease-of-use and access and you will gain a competitive advantage. Read our White Paper: ‘Making The Case For Embedded BI And Analytics.’

Embedded BI Can Improve Customer Service!

Using Embedded BI to Improve Customer Service and Satisfaction!

As a software solution product and service provider, you are focused on the common issues your customers face, providing features and functionality that will satisfy the most customers and give you an edge in the market.

Embedded BI Provides Insight Into Enterprise Data!

Embedded BI Can Provide Numerous Benefits to the Team and the Enterprise!

When a business invests in technology, either to buy a best-of-breed solution or to develop their own enterprise apps, there is significant expense. If you are developing your own solution, you are using in-house resources or engaging IT consultants. If you are purchasing solutions off the shelf, you may or may not need customization but, in any case, the solution will cost you quite a bit of money and it will take more funding to support and maintain and integrate that solution.

Does Embedded BI Offer a Business Application Advantage?

Can Embedded BI Make My Software Business More Competitive?

If your business creates software products and applications, you know how competitive the market can be, and you are always looking for ways to gain a competitive advantage. In this article, we discuss the competitive advantages of adding analytics to your product offerings.

‘If you embed analytics within your product or application, you can provide partners, suppliers, vendors and customers with a tool that supports fact-based decisions and metrics within a familiar application.’

Gartner states that embedded BI provides benefits to users when, ‘data analysis occurs within a user’s natural workflow, without the need to toggle to another application.’ When your users enjoy this benefit, your application or product is likely to attract more clients and retain those clients by providing productivity and avoiding user frustration.

Create a Business Advantage: Add Embedded BI to Your App

For example, if you have created a financial application that provides information on investments and services, you can add augmented analytics and embedded BI to your application to allow your users to perform analytics to determine how successful their investment strategy is and where their money is being leveraged. A health or fitness application can also provide analytics to analyze fitness regimens and results, medical results for medications, i.e., blood pressure reduction following a new medication protocol, etc.

Harvard Business Review states that employees spend up to five weeks a year toggling between applications. That’s a lot of wasted time! If you can promote your own application and product with embedded BI, you can offer your end users a seamless experience and allow them to gain insight into data, which gives you a competitive edge and sets you apart from other service providers in the market.

If you embed analytics within your product or application, you can provide partners, suppliers, vendors and customers with a tool that supports fact-based decisions and metrics within a familiar application. These self-serve embedded BI options are suitable for all types of software products and applications, and allow you to integrate dashboards, to monetize data within products and to create a value-added experience for customers. You can drive user adoption and build loyalty using analytical workflow.

Remember that your competitors are always looking for ways to gain an advantage and, when it comes to competitive advantage, nothing is better than customer loyalty. To gain that advantage, you will want to make your end user’s life easier with embedded BI that helps them see and analyze data, optimize time and enable valuable insight so that they can make the right decision, make recommendations and suggestions to solve problems and to capitalize on opportunities.

Providing this information within your popular application helps the user to adapt to their own business needs and will ensure software product adoption with positive enterprise outcomes. These tools are easy-to-use and do not require a data scientist or IT professional. They make analytics easy to use and to understand which your customers will appreciate.

‘Gartner states that embedded BI provides benefits to users when, ‘data analysis occurs within a user’s natural workflow, without the need to toggle to another application.’

You can find out more about the Smarten Embedded BI And Integration APIs solution and add powerful functionality and access to existing ERP, SCM, HRMS, CRM or any other products. Provide analytics capabilities within existing products without major Investment. Your business users and your customers will appreciate the ease-of-use and access and you will gain a competitive advantage. Read our White Paper: ‘Making The Case For Embedded BI And Analytics.’

Embedded BI and Augmented Analytics Support ISV Partner Clients!

How Can Embedded BI Help ISV Partners Improve Revenue and Market Visibility?!

Recent research reveals that 67% of companies surveyed say time spent in their applications increased after they embedded analytics. Why do you suppose that is?

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!

Attention Software Companies: Embed BI Analytics and Win!

Why Spend Time and Money Developing BI? Embed BI in Your Software Product!

The research and technology consulting firm, Gartner predicts that ‘By 2023, overall analytics adoption will increase from 35% to 50%, driven by vertical and domain-specific augmented analytics solutions.’ Whether your software business produces solutions or modules for a vertical market, a specific industry or a government or public service market, building an analytical solution to serve your clients or partners is an expensive, complicated proposition and one that will require significant funding and skilled resources.

Embedded BI with APIs: A Simple Path to OEM and ISV Success!

The technology research and consulting firm, Gartner predicted that ‘By 2023, 60% of organizations will compose components from three or more analytics solutions to build business applications infused with analytics that connect insights to actions.’

Include Embedded BI into Your Business Applications!

A recent survey found that 93% of application teams report improvement in user experience as a result of embedded analytics, and 94% of teams report improved customer satisfaction with embedded analytics. The concept of embedded BI is simple. By leveraging APIs, the augmented analytics solution is embedded within familiar enterprise apps and made available to users via single sign-on so that the user can access  favorite software solutions and applications to perform tasks and use the data contained there to analyze data and make decisions.

How Can I Improve Business Intelligence and Augmented Analytics ROI and TCO?

Business managers, owners and senior executives really want to do the right thing! The goal is always to improve the business, to hire the best staff and to satisfy customers and partners. To do that, the business must build a foundation of business processes, policies, technology and software that will support goals and objectives and make it easier, more timely and more efficient to perform tasks and complete activities.