Analytics Unchained Blog Series Part 7: Analytics to the Masses

[MatthewM]

Earlier this week I did a joint webinar, Making Predictive Analytics More Accessible to Business Analysts with Tony Cosentino of Ventana Research. Some of the research findings that he presented during the webinar about analytic challenges facing organizations were very interesting, not to mention the content around predictive analytics. The three most interesting points for me were:

1. Funding for predictive analytics projects usually comes from the line of business. Predictive analytics should be a business investment rather than an IT investment, and most participants recognize this. Two-thirds of organizations fund these projects from business budgets: 44 percent from general business budgets and 23 percent from a line of business’s IT budget. This supports one of the Alteryx core competencies of empowering business analysts to answer business questions faster and simpler.
2. Some of the top barriers organizations are facing when dealing with data and predictive analytics are multiple versions of the truth, and also data spread across too many applications and systems. The ability of Alteryx to access any type of data, from any source and blend that data in a single solution, without relying on data specialist or outside interaction delivers that single source of information helping to reduce and in most cases remove barriers.
3. Software is too hard to use was a technical challenge encountered in using predictive analytics by organizations. One of our main goals at Alteryx is to make predictive analytics as accessible and easy to use as possible, in particular for the business analyst. We remove all of the complexity and coding, and give business analysts the tools they need to not only prepare the data, but also run the analysis and find the answer without having to be a statistician.

All of these components help support an organizations ability to get Analytics Unchained. Companies are making analytics more accessible throughout their business; isn’t it time that analytics vendors do the same? Legacy vendors like SAS are trying to do this through tools like Visual Analytics, but this is just part of the process- typically visualization tools aren’t giving the whole picture and aren’t incorporating predictive analytics, so you are still going to have to rely on another tool for predictive analytics. According to Ventana Research 76% of decision makers have no doubt that predictive analytics is a top priority, so it should be a top priority to get the results of predictive analytics into the hands of the people who can benefit from it the most.

Analytics Unchained Blog Series

Part 1 – Remove the Complexity in your Analytics Software Cost

Part 2 – Different Analytic Challenges Don’t Require Expensive Software

Part 3 – Buy What You Need, Not What They Want to Sell You

Part 4 – Analytics Unchained: Teradata and Revolution

Part 5 – Pay for the Results, Not for the Luxury

Part 6 – R You Ready to Improve Your Analytics

Part 7 – Analytics to the Masses

Part 8 – Analytics Comparison: Alteryx vs. SAS

Part 9 – What is the True Cost of your Analytics Solution

Part 10 – Improving your Analytic Outcomes Over SAS