Matt Potts

3 critical elements for business analytics delivery

Introduction

Business users are demanding BI dashboards to interact with their data to drive insights and action, containing both historical and forward looking data. They need bespoke content, layouts, interaction, navigation options etc along with the ability to converse between guided/set navigation and self-service capability. It’s a balancing act of building content that quickly gives the user an updated business position, a stance on exceptions they need to address as well the possibly to explore the data for any on-the-fly analysis. It all needs to be engaging and performant too.

This content is all being demanded at speed, people need information quickly (take too long to build them something and they’ll just go and build it themselves!). It’s also demanded that the content can constantly evolve, again at speed. Business is dynamic, therefore so is decision making and therefore so is analytics content.

There’s a real need to ensure you have the right technology solutions and processes to be able to build and deliver analytical content that can all analytics content to:

1- Be delivered at speed (initially and continually)

Stuff needs to be delivered quickly and often. Business users can wait. If they do they’ll go and build themselves (often through point solutions with little though for integration, scalability or governance). Have a technology and process in place that allows you to embrace speed and agility rather fight against it.

This is why agile is such a vital approach for analytics projects.

Technology wise, being able to develop at speed can be supported by solutions that allow you to deliver content with little to no code.

2- Co-exist with the ability to execute an action

Applications that only allow the analysis of information means that the users have to go elsewhere to then act on that information (contact a customer, create a workflow task etc). We need to have a composite environment where the ability to analyse and act can all take place in the same place (ideally the same screen) and at the same time. This can sometimes be a challenge for traditional analytics/BI tools as they are designed, by their nature, to focus on the analysis part – this is why embedding BI capabilities/content/products into transactional systems can be important.

3 – Span across all your sources of data

It’s very rare that all data exists in one single place or systems (whether you have a single vendor or technology platform strategy in place or not). You therefore need something that can easily integrate and sit across any system that is running within the business.

These of course aren’t the only challenges that analytics project faces but those that have been the most prevalent for me on projects I have worked on in the past.