The days of data silos and exclusive data access are over. Data Scientists and business analysts are still an important component of the business and IT teams are still crucial to the success and stability of the organization BUT if you are thinking that these roles are still responsible for day-to-day analytics and delivering every bit of data analysis to the enterprise, your business strategy needs an upgrade!
When a business takes on the task of going from an opinion-based, guessing game environment to a metrics-based, fact-based environment, it must decide WHAT to measure. Metrics are fine, but deciding what is important to measure is crucial. You can measure the wrong things and end up knowing nothing about what is happening in your enterprise, and which tasks and activities are contributing to your bottom line, as opposed to the tasks that are non-productive and business processes that should be modified.
A recent report revealed that by, 2028, the Augmented Analytics market is projected to reach USD 46.26 billion at a CAGR of 24.30%. The business intelligence solution market has evolved into augmented analytics and these solutions designs have progressed to support average business users with simple solutions that combine sophisticated analytical techniques and algorithms with easy navigation, reporting and insight.
If you are a business manager, senior executive, IT professional or analytical professional, you are probably well aware of the emergence of business intelligence solutions, BI tools and augmented analytics for business users. In all likelihood, you have been hearing about these trends in annual conference and industry journals. If your business has not yet adopted such an initiative, it is likely to do so within the next year. But it might surprise you to know that, world renowned technology research firm, Gartner, predicts that ‘By 2022, augmented analytics will be ubiquitous, but only 10% of users will use it to its full potential.’ Given the focus and effort invested in business intelligence and augmented analytics, this prediction is disappointing, but understandable.
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.
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.
All of your business users have a favorite software application – an app they value because it helps them do their job more easily, or helps them get crucial information. These are the applications they have learned and they are used to leveraging them on a day-to-day basis to perform tasks. When you introduce augmented analytics into your business environment, one of the most critical factors is whether you can expect user adoption. Finding and implementing the right augmented analytics solution is just the first step. If you can’t get your users to USE the application, your return on investment (ROI) will be poor and your total cost of ownership (TCO) will be high.
Perhaps you have resisted the temptation to democratize data in your organization. Your resistance may come from in-house, in the form of those who tell you that data governance is impossible in an environment where you spread your data far and wide. Perhaps you believe that the average business user cannot and will not use business intelligence tools, so any expense or time to implement such a solution would be wasteful. Perhaps you feel that the value of such a solution and of user adoption of these tools is overrated, and that ROI and TCO would not be worth the time and effort.
No matter your reason for investing in that business application, the investment was meant to improve the business, to make team members more productive, to act as a repository for important business data and to somehow improve the bottom line. But, the effectiveness and success of a software solution depends on more than its features and functionality. Yes, one must consider its ease of use too, but that’s not the point of our discussion today.
