Tag: White Paper
If your enterprise wishes to consider AI in analytics, and plan for its future potential and growth, it is wise to first understand the state of the technology today, the various ways in which AI can inform and improve analytics for your business, the factors you will need to consider to choose the right analytics solution and the things your business should include in its vendor and solution review.
For organizations that wish to leverage advanced analytics, the first order of business is to evaluate the maturity of the advanced analytical culture within the organization and among its users and decide whether the entire team is ready to take on the task of accurately analyzing business results, and planning and making course corrections on a daily basis. If the organization is not ready for this change, the business management team must plan for and execute a transition to quickly, carefully, and successfully move the enterprise into the advanced analytics arena.
There are many variables to the success of an advanced analytics solution but the primary pitfalls for this type of project can be traced back to poor planning. If the organization is not ready for self-serve advanced analytics, the initiative will fail. Organizational readiness is, in fact, one of the most overlooked issues in any type of software, system or technology introduction. If the enterprise wishes to succeed and achieve its goals for self-serve advanced analytics it must have a clear vision of what it wants to accomplish. It needs to have a comprehensive understanding of its requirements (technical, infrastructure, processes, tasks, locations, team members, etc.) The enterprise also needs to assess its need for external vs. internal assistance in implementation and training.
The ‘culture’ of an organization includes habits and processes that are familiar and comfortable. There are many aspects to the success of a culture change within a business organization. When an enterprise decides to move from the silo spreadsheet culture to Advanced Analytics it can go beyond simple spreadsheet analysis and BI reporting with a comprehensive analytical environment that identifies business opportunities, and provides metrics and measurements, predictive modeling and forecasting, and self-serve data preparation tools for business users. By understanding how and why team members employ spreadsheets, the enterprise can develop a strategy to move to a fact-based, secured environment with tools that users will want to adopt.
By providing sophisticated analytical features and algorithms in an easy-to-use self-serve environment, the enterprise enables business users to perform data preparation and test theories and hypotheses and prototype on their own. Rather than preparing data at the central meta-data layer, and restricting what business users can do and see, IT enabled (rather than IT controlled), self-serve data preparation allows users to compile and prepare data and use that data in analytics to test hypotheses, perform visualization and create and share reports, and create custom alerts and other information. Business users can control the data elements, the volume and the timing.
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.