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.
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.’
Original Post : Choose Augmented Analytics Designed for Business Users!