{"id":12500,"date":"2016-06-06T16:09:13","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T15:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=7844"},"modified":"2021-08-18T17:38:57","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T15:38:57","slug":"why-the-future-of-analytics-is-about-more-than-self-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/why-the-future-of-analytics-is-about-more-than-self-service.html","title":{"rendered":"Why The Future of Analytics Is About More Than Self-Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

The latest edition of the Gartner BI Summit rolls out this week in Mumbai<\/a>, India.<\/p>\n

It seems an appropriate time to talk about why it’s important for\u00a0business people to have Modern BI<\/a> tools that let them handle end-to-end business intelligence themselves, without having to call IT — but also to point out that the future of Analytics is about much more than that.<\/p>\n

BI and Analytics is booming. It’s yet again the #1 priority for CIOs<\/a>\u00a0this year, for the ninth time in eleven years.\u00a0But\u00a0the obvious question is: if it\u2019s been such a priority for so long, why haven\u2019t we fixed it yet?!<\/strong><\/p>\n

I believe that it’s\u00a0because even as technology has surged forward, business expectations have risen even faster.<\/p>\n

Analytics is now no longer only about helping organizations make better decisions \u2014 it provides\u00a0the foundation for the business models of the future.<\/strong> It’s not\u00a0just essential for our decision makers, but also for our customers.<\/p>\n

As consumers,\u00a0we now expect organizations to know who we are, what we\u2019ve purchased in the past, and to make personalized recommendations. We expect instant information about problems: a cancelled plane, a delayed order, or an out-of-stock product. And we expect organizations to to\u00a0correct those\u00a0problems quickly and flexibly.<\/p>\n

In other words, information is now part of<\/em> the products and services we buy and sell. And this means that real-time, contextual, personalized data — also known as “analytics” — is now an essential ingredient of\u00a0the optimized customer experience.<\/p>\n

This has two big consequences. First, it means business people need to be able to quickly experiment and adapt the new information-embedded products and services\u00a0to changing customer needs. They can’t wait days or weeks to get the answer to new questions. And they need as much information from outside the company as they do from corporate systems.<\/p>\n

So self-service access to IT-created reports and dashboards is not longer enough. Business people need easy tools that let them mash together data from anywhere, on the fly. And if these tools aren\u2019t provided by IT, they\u2019ll go out and buy their own.<\/p>\n

\"sap<\/a><\/p>\n

Modern BI with\u00a0SAP BusinessObjects Cloud<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Of course, if everybody does that, the result is chaos, with each department making up their own incompatible performance metrics based on dubious data, and lots of expensive duplication of resources.<\/p>\n

So the future is about governed<\/em> self-service access to data, and every vendor in the industry is trying to provide the best of governance with the best of flexibility for business people.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s time to give company executives what they\u2019ve been dreaming of since the dawn of computers. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

They don\u2019t want endless meetings, discussing what extra data they need to make a decision. <\/span>They want interactive, real-time access to corporate data from high-level objectives down to the most granular transactions. They want to do collaborative what-if analysis and make strategic decisions based on what\u2019s going on right now in the business. And of course this should be based on the same technology that powers self-service access to information elsewhere.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"sap<\/a>
\n<\/a>SAP Digital Boardroom<\/a>, based on SAP BusinessObjects Cloud<\/p>\n

But thinking about BI only in terms of data for staff<\/em> risks missing the bigger picture.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Your customers also now need your analytics system to work for them. No just in terms of “extranet” reporting and analysis (that has been around for a long time<\/a>!), but fueling\u00a0the customer experience itself.<\/p>\n

To be competitive in the\u00a0future, you need a strong analytics foundation for Live Business<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0that let you anticipate and fix problems before<\/em> they happen, rather than just reporting on the past:<\/p>\n