Harvard Business Review: The Untapped Power of Self-Service Data Analytics

[MatthewM]

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services recently released The Untapped Power of Self-Service Data Analytics.  This study highlights results from polling of over 600 business and IT leaders across 15 different industries and sectors on their use of data analytics and the challenges they face in delivering the right data for faster, more accurate decisions. Unfortunately, for most of these respondents, their current data analytics tools fall short in several important areas, such as ease of use, speed and scalability.  This is where self-service data analytics can help.

According to the study, line of business decision makers and analysts throughout enterprises are faced with two big challenges.

• First, they are burdened with legacy tools and processes. Many of these processes are manual or rely on technology that wasn’t built to handle today’s data needs.  In fact, the study indicates that 84% of users still rely on spreadsheets for their analysis.
• Second, many of the legacy tools weren’t built for line of business analysts, so they have to rely on data specialists and data scientists to do most of the data preparation, blending and analysis for them. According to the study, 62% of organizations still rely on IT or data analytics groups for their data analysis, and only 31% are satisfied with their ability to compile information, and the speed and quality of their work.

This is what makes self-service data analytics so important.  Self-service data analytics empowers LoB data analysts to take charge of the entire analytical process instead of relying on data specialists to create the critical tools they need or to do the analysis work for them. In addition, data managers can now deploy self-service data solutions that easily prepare, cleanse, blend, and analyze all relevant data. All of these tasks require no coding. 

“With these self-service tools, you don’t have to deal with IT at all,” says Wayne Eckerson, president of research and consulting firm Eckerson Group. “While IT still needs to provide governance, at least for now, data managers don’t need to wait in line for IT to clear a data mart for them.”

In fact, Fortune 500 organizations such as Southwest Airlines are utilizing self-service data analytics to drive change throughout their organization.  Before Southwest Airlines deployed its self-service solution, the overall process was extremely time consuming. It also made outcome-sharing quite difficult. But now, Preethi Elango, an enterprise data strategist at Southwest Airlines says, “Having such powerful self-service data analytics tools has created a faster path from data to insight.” Another Fortune 500 automaker is utilizing self-service data analytics to answer critical business questions much quicker and easier than ever before.  So much so that the automaker’s senior analytics researcher states, “I can call up all this data by pushing a button and have the up-to-the-minute status and a new set of results. And it’s all in dashboards that are accessible for our LoB managers and business leaders.”

These are just a few of the highlights and ways that self-service data analytics is having an impact across enterprises. If you struggle with the efficiency of data and analytics and want to learn more about the benefits of self-service data analytics, you can check out the details of the full report.