Analytics
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I have been in the world of analytics in some shape or form for the past 10 years; from marketing automation, business execution, and business intelligence. Over the course of time, I have noticed a shift in the method of thinking. And this shift is evident in the perception of Business Intelligence versus Analytics.
In their latest BI-focused Magic Quadrant, Gartner has classified Business Intelligence and Analytics together. But the question is; should it be? There are definitely synergies between the two - it is all about getting information from the data that you have. Some of the differences are:
- how do you get the data and how do you use it?
- is this something that is directly accessible for an analyst?
- are you able to make changes to the data and still be confident in the accuracy of the data?
- what do you do with the information, once you have it?
Let’s first take a look at the world of Business Intelligence, traditionally providing information through the use of reports and dashboards. It shows the data we have today or what has happened in the past, but BI doesn’t really allow users to make a true decision that can affect the business in the immediacy. IT also can affect the decision making process because organizations are relying on them to harness the right data and create the complete dataset, to provide insight. Organizations are now adapting through Data Discovery - giving immediate access to visualization and data, letting them understand what is going on in their business today. This Agile BI can give the analyst the access and insight they need to make more immediate decisions on what is affecting their business today.
This was the case with a large cable/internet provider who had a variety of BI standards and a very-well established, IT-centric, BI Center of Excellence. Even with all of these tools, their end users still lacked insight into the data. To help counter balance this, they implemented a visualization tool that allowed the end users access the data without relying on IT, and in a much better user interface. This gave them an instant display of historical data, but they needed faster access to multiple sources of data, an ability to add predictive models to the data, and the ability to do this all ad hoc at the line of business level so that they could make decisions that drove the business forward. By adding these capabilities through Alteryx, their quote was that they “could now look through the windshield instead of always looking into the rearview mirror.”
As we can see, the difference between Business Intelligence and Analytics is the difference between reporting, and just looking at data. From my perspective analytics belongs in the line of business rather than IT. Then by incorporating some type of workflow, analytics can produce forward-thinking results, such as which customers are most likely to buy or respond to an offer, or where to put the next retail location. It really comes down to applying the best business logic to your data, to help make the best decisions.
This is the case with a multinational CPG organization I worked with in the past. They were looking for a more agile way to help with forecasting sales across their enterprise. They were facing the same “bottleneck” - limited access to data through IT. The line of business groups go through a lengthy process to ‘request’ a data-set from IT, which gets extracted from the data warehouse and puts into a format that is ready to be analyzed. The time to insight takes at least 3 months. The problem is compounded because that insight drives deeper, more focused questions that now caused them to have to go back through the same process for more data. The end result: they made more decisions on gut vs. data. By incorporating a better analytics approach to sales forecasting, it allowed them to provide more accuracy in their decisions and eliminate the guessing.
So at the end of the day, it does matter which approach you take to your data, because the information that you extract from the data is going to affect the decisions your organizations make. This ultimately will affect how successful your organization is or can be.
Dan Beley
Account Executive – Ontario, Canada
