How do we cut through the jumble of Business Analytics?
Janet Amos
Pribanic
Chief Operating Officer
In the words of my favorite musical, The Sound of Music, “Let’s start at the
very beginning, a very good place to start.”
Business
Intelligence analysts confirm that adoption is still not what we anticipated it
to be. Recently I read a statistic that
stated 64% of business users still make decisions on “gut” and not fact-based
information. Have we progressed into
Business Discovery, leaving behind traditional BI? With the pace of mobile swirling around us
all, have we really adapted our BI strategies to incorporate mobile? When I refer to starting at the very
beginning, it refers to a form of self-reflection. If we are to truly engage successfully in any
flavor of Business Intelligence, we must review the basic information needs of
our organization.
The Business
Intelligence to Performance Management to Business Analytics progression is
still about solving one big challenge for most enterprises: How do we leverage the information we have –
information about our markets, our suppliers, our customers, our employees,
etc., and leverage that information to make us a better performing
company? Adoption of the technology, the
processes, and the people to plan and implement these solutions, is still a
journey. The most successful companies
embrace this journey and see it as part of their standard business practice. We have seen companies embrace Business
Analytics, and weather the economic storm much better than their competitors –
if their competitors made it at all.
This “win” for an organization really is that powerful.
Businesses
are still gathering enormous amounts of data – and now we even have a fancy
name – “Big Data.” Business users are
still churning through those enormous amounts of data, and yield tremendous
value from their BI reporting, query, dashboard, and scorecard solutions. The benefit of having this information
available to the business user is so that effective and accurate business
decisions can be made, which gives clear advantage to the one who masters these
concepts and processes first ("first-mover advantage"). Now enter the idea of analytics. BI has historically given us analytics
capabilities. After all, that is why
OLAP was born, and we all fell in love with the ease of the “slice and dice,”
“drag and drop,” and “drill down” function.
But business is different now – financial crises, economic challenge,
and the ability to keep up with the emerging technology to address these
impacts on our business, makes our desire to dig deeper and learn more,
quicker, better, faster and even more insatiable. Let’s face it, analysts need to be able to
identify trends, predict performance outcomes, and stay ahead of their
competition to survive. Those who
leverage the use of Business Analytics successfully will win that battle, and
their companies will outperform. Those
who don’t are left behind.
Let’s break
down consumption of “data”…
Reporting –
it is still needed!
A
typical consumer of analytical reporting is a business user who prefers well-formatted,
regularly delivered reports that provide some guidance on what areas need
attention. These users typically need a “top-down” view of their functional
area of the business- product performance, customer revenues, etc. This user may also want to drill through to
related reports to gain additional insight or detail, such as the specific
product lines performing below expected or forecasted levels. A business user of analytical reporting
typically wants to operate autonomously from IT, in a "self-service"
fashion. For the user who needs
analytical reporting, the reporting environment may be delivered from a
multi-dimensional source, which gives the flexibility of analytic reporting and
drill function, and enables IT to control what this user should or should not
see (respecting security, of course!).
Analysis –
typically reserved for the more sophisticated user – today’s business discovery
tools make this easy peasy!!
In most
cases, just reporting is not sufficient for this user (typically a business analyst). They
want more freedom to explore the information, for example, viewing performance
over different time horizons, as well as multiple or different perspectives of
the same information to confirm hunches or theories. Every organization has these users, and in
some cases, a large number of them. In
clients without a standard Business Intelligence platform, we find that these
users invariably resort to Excel to "mash up" and manipulate data
exactly the way they want to. But – we
are challenging the very controls of our organization by making Excel our analytics
platform.
We assess
that users who have more demanding analysis needs have (likely) been dumping
information into sophisticated spreadsheets that demands hours of manual
manipulation. Those users realize
capable business insight to things such as top and bottom analysis and are
responsible for delivering answers to complex questions within their
enterprises.
The solution
– trust these users with analytics or business discovery solutions. They are typically smarter than you
think! Given a data model that will
protect the integrity of the data and business rules and a solid security model
that assures data integrity, most analytic users are fluent in the song of
data…..and given the right tools – they can really sing!
Hmmmmm, but
“What If” we need a little more than just analytics?
When
businesses want to determine the impact of a new business approach by
evaluating alternate business scenarios, they require a BA capability called
Scenario Modeling. In Scenario Modeling,
we introduce the capability for business users to develop “what-if” analysis on
the fly. It gives us the flexibility to
model scenarios against large data sets, re-organize, and compare scenarios
within our business. For example, a user
may wish to understand the impact to their customer base if a price increase is
introduced on a product within a specific product line ("sensitivity
analysis"). What if we increase
pricing by 10 percent, 20 percent, etc.?
How many customers are affected by that price increase in our market?
Scenario
modeling capabilities provide information that is highly strategic to the
business, and typically leveraged by fewer users than other forms of
analysis. These users are looking for
financial analysis, profitability analysis, etc. and are able to adjust the
analysis model without having to re-load or re-request the data. The benefit to their business is real
scenario comparison, based on a data model which enables analysis with what-if
benefit.
Predicting
our futures! Careful, we might not want
to know ;)
Some/many
businesses are interested in “what might be” within their data. For example, if we run an algorithm within
the data, with specific criteria directing, then predictive outcomes may
prevent possible mistakes. An
organization looking to uncover patterns within their business, apply
algorithms, mine data and text, and predict outcomes is the organization who
will extend Predictive Modeling within the solution and challenge their
competition with driving insight.
So – How do
we start the Business Analytics Journey?
The concept
of business analysis is now a mature perspective, and your options for
leveraging benefit from that analysis are greater due to the flexibility of technology
available in the market- But technology alone will not get you there.
Businesses
that are interested in pursuing Business Analytics will expand the perspective
of their business for a more “complete” view, facilitate collaboration, and
respond to growing user communities and demands for faster performance to more
data. The journey to successfully
accomplish this task and the natural extension of BI with Business Analytics
will require that an organization establish and agree on a process and solid
strategy.
As companies dig through their data to look
for these answers, to gain insight from enhanced analysis or reporting, it
becomes clear that they need the means to understand and measure their goals
and progress. But don’t be fooled –
selecting some cool technology which will yield great graphs and highly
formatted reports will not necessarily solve this problem. We have learned over and over again, that the
tools are only part of the solution. As
a matter of fact, many companies make the mistake of thinking the tools “solve
all their data problems.” The single
largest challenge is not the tools, infrastructure, or data- it is the
people. Organizations need to ask
themselves:
1.
Do we have the people and a culture that truly understands our
business and who are willing to make fact-based (not gut-based) decisions? Fact-based decisions don’t always “feel
good.”
2.
Do we have the process and methodology that will take what we
learn from our Business Intelligence and apply that to new business decisions
and process?
3.
Will our culture enable, embrace, and execute change?
Answers to these questions require executive
input, executive direction, and a commitment to the plan for execution. More importantly, if the answer to the
questions above is “no,” then save your budget, time, and sanity and don’t
embark on the journey. Should that be
your choice, however, one must know that your competition is likely figuring
out how to make this work to gain competitive advantage through insights to
their market, their customers, and ultimately, their profits.
This is a
high-level view of some of the Business Analytics perspectives that
organizations might consider before investing in, or changing, their BI tools
selection. It is high-level on purpose,
so that as you consider of the “kind” of solution, you focus on the right
vehicle for delivery. John Daniel
Associates is an 18 year old Business Intelligence practice. Our solutions represent the QlikView and IBM
Cognos platforms. Future blogs will
provide deeper technical content on both platforms – so keep bloggin’ with us!
