The Best Enterprise Analytics Investment

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1 The Best Enterprise Analytics Investment 5 Imperatives for Expanding the Benefits of BI With the needs of different departments, roles, and types of users in mind, this article describes five analytics imperatives that CXO s and Data Leaders should consider when developing or refining a strategy for comprehensively addressing analysis and insight needs across the entire enterprise. NOT ALL USERS ARE THE SAME 1

2 Gone are the days where finance is the only department with access to data insights. Many of today s sales and marketing teams would be flying blind without their daily dose of reports and dashboards. Although the vision of pervasive BI increasing enterprise performance and competitiveness is clear and simple, expanding access to analytics across the enterprise is challenging with no shortage of political and technical complexity. Attempts to scale BI and analytics benefits introduce challenges in the form of different data types, aesthetic preferences, user skills, and operating environments. Accountants, engineers, sales reps, and customer service agents create and view analytics in a multitude of ways. While viewing a report as an attachment perfectly addresses the needs of one group, others could require a much more interactive experience with the ability to write SQL, for example. Differences in role, environment, and data visualization savvy all present major hurdles to adoption. However, buying a dozen tools for different user profiles, training factory workers to be data analysts, or forcing call center staff to log into a separate BI tool are not practical solutions. While existing use of a BI tool may serve a particular group of users, deploying an analytics solution for multiple areas of the enterprise requires a strategy and roadmap encompassing both variation in user personas and operational scalability. Naïve assumptions and brute force attempts by some companies result in consequences ranging from thousands of dollars in idle user licenses to proliferation of superfluous infrastructure or entire departments feeling alienated. Five critical success imperatives should be considered when an analytics strategy calls for supporting multiple groups with diverse analytics styles while satisfying core requirements to deliver insights to all parts of a distributed enterprise. 2

3 VISUALIZE ANY WAY Enterprises who are celebrating wins for accomplishing shifts to Web 2.0 technologies cannot rest. Another phase in the evolution in web technologies now makes it possible to extend legacy business applications beyond the traditional confines of the office. With the right applications, mobile devices now allow office work to get done virtually anywhere, anytime. Applied to BI and analytics applications, responsive interfaces mean that executives on-the-go, supervisors on factory floors, and technicians out in the field can access analytics as if they were sitting in front of full desktops. Harnessing the power of the responsive web technologies, an analytics solution should offer self-service querying and analysis capabilities so users can create and customize insights on-demand without IT intervention. Inquisitive users need the capability to slice and dice the data and look at results from every possible dimension without the complexity of OLAP tools designed for data architects. Analyzing data should not require building or restructuring tables within data warehouse star schemas or cubes which often means stale data by the time it is available for users. While static report delivery is preferred in some instances, self-service access and visualization against operational data provide greater functionality and solve real-time use cases. A core analytics team should be able to provide different sets of pre-defined templates tailored to the needs of distinct user groups. The templates serve as a jumpstart for users to create their own reports, dashboards, and insights from operational or other data. By empowering end users with a modern analytics solution that supports different visualization styles on any device, your company can ensure business information is available when and where it is needed. 3

4 DELIVERY ANYWHERE The concept of actionable information arrived in the Business Intelligence marketplace a long time ago but today s world of cloud and mobile has redefined the definition of success. While providing corporate managers with an Over Budget report was once considered a big win, the stakes have moved way further ahead. We now see every store manager across a chain of two thousand retail outlets empowered with real-time metrics on his or her mobile device. Leading manufacturers have embedded real-time quality control metrics within specialized displays along the assembly line. To produce more actionable information, fields can be added and removed; data can be dynamically sorted, filtered, and grouped; crosstabs can be pivoted; and users can drill down, up, or across data to get detailed and aggregate information. All of these actions help shape insights that expedite synthesis of data and spur actions to achieve business goals. However a company can reduce costs and increase efficiencies by implementing a field service solution to support the right standardized processes, in the right technical environment with the right ease of use. Peter Purcell, CIO Magazine 2016, How to support field employees efficiently and effectively with the 3 P's. In preparing to expand the benefits of analytic insights to different parts of the organization, an analytics solution needs the ability to reach targeted audiences, regardless of display preferences, device environment, or physical location. Workers on a factory floor, support representatives working remotely, or field technicians visiting residential homes with wireless-enabled laptops represent new possibilities for expanded analytics benefits. A strategy that prioritizes insight delivery to anywhere your users are working is now critical to serving additional functional business units. 4

5 INTEGRATE ANY DATA, INTO ANY APPLICATION A solution that readily integrates into a variety of IT and application architectures is critical to expanding analytics benefits across the enterprise. Each part of the organization typically has its own set of applications and data types. Aiming for an analytics platform that is only ready for the first project or the first set of dashboards and reports likely leads to failure. Greater success comes taking stock of all core enterprise applications, all of the core data types, and IT s core operational skillsets, as this is the best way to ensure effectiveness while maximizing existing investments. Whereas traditional analytic solutions comprised of monolithic desktop applications, today s most flexible solutions offer the ability to seamlessly integrate into existing applications. And, as businesses continue to shift towards utilizing the SaaS and cloud applications, emphasis should be placed on support for integrating or embedding analytics into web applications that run on cloud infrastructure. Other considerations to determine the enterprise-wide-readiness of an analytics and reporting solution are secure connectivity to internal data as well as 3 rd -party data sources, often in the form of hierarchical XML-based API s, hosted on the cloud. Redefining or just refining your BI and analytics strategy might include retiring some data integration points or even tools. Though sometimes tough, taking these actions are a vital aspect of technology lifecycle management. If you are currently using a reporting tool and are considering another solution, you also need to take into account migration issues including downtime, formats, and user training. Turnkey analytics vendors who have deeper experience in reporting will be able to provide you with a tool to convert your legacy reports to the new solution. If report and dashboard migrations are necessary, seek vendors who will custom-tailor migration services to reduce downtime while speeding deployment of improved versions of existing analytics assets. 5

6 INSTILL CONFIDENCE AT ALL TIMES. Many enterprises are diligently working to leverage the latest web and mobile technologies that promise self-service insights from virtually anywhere, at anytime. This new paradigm, however, does not address an increasingly complex challenge how do we ensure any individual user is empowered with the ability to create insights while enforcing access polices for a growing number of data sets. Governed self-service access reduces the burden on IT but more importantly, it instills the confidence that functional leaders require before approving data access and staff participation in analytics initiatives and investments. Reporting and visualization solutions should offer multiple security features, including the ability to leverage existing network security credentials through LDAP authentication. Single sign-on releases users from having to authenticate twice to access the application and the reports. Page-level security (PLS) and report bursting are two features that ensure each user can only see the data he is authorized to see, either by embedding the security control into the report result (PLS) or physically splitting the report into individual files only the authorized user can access (report bursting). Many individual functions within global enterprises now require 24x7 data availability. Business unit leaders need to know that issues and outages will be addressed in a responsive manner. Operationally, even when there is a single point of failure, mission-critical report workloads should keep running and dynamically scale to utilize available resources to preserve operational continuity. When scaling deployments to more users, business owners want to know that a shared analytics model provides them with significant value. Successfully expanding analytics across the enterprise requires gaining the confidence of different business unit leaders. Establishing the right platform capabilities for governance, security, and operational reliability are crucial to delivering this confidence. 6

7 OPERATE & SCALE WITHIN BUDGET When an analytics strategy calls for a shared analytics platform, operational efficiency that increases with greater user adoption is essential to success. Effective use of virtualized compute power together with load balancing in a clustered environment provides maximum performance at the lowest cost. This ensures compatibility with public cloud infrastructure and enables distribution of workloads across available server resources. Scalable IT operations also comes from integrated performance monitoring that indicates health of individual user groups and platform components. Web-enabled performance monitors enable remote administrators to spot critical usage trends, manage load balancing, and identify coming failures. Enterprises seeking a shared analytics service approach should set aggressive goals and be ready to support adoption by multiple departments in parallel. Candidate solutions should be intuitive in nature but also flexible enough to support deeper analysis styles preferred by advanced users. Look for solutions that remove complexity from self-service initiatives while offering precision formatting and visualization needed to create any corporate, regulatory, or customer report. Gartner projects the market for public cloud services is expected to grow by nearly 17% this year. A slowing economy drives businesses to wring more efficiency from their technology budgets. Dan Gallagher, Wall Street Journal 2016, Why Cloud Scale Is Worth the Price for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. In addition to maximizing existing IT investments, it is equally important to consider total cost of ownership (TCO) for any software solution. TCO includes the cost of the solution plus variable costs like professional integration services, training, hardware, technical operations, and maintenance. Solutions that take advantage of your existing on-premise or cloud environment lower your TCO. When analytics platforms do not operate and scale efficiently in your environment, the resulting costs could easily exceed initial development costs for data sets, reports, and dashboards. 7

8 SUMMARY While attempts to future-proof any technology in this time of rapid change is a risky endeavour, a comprehensive strategy and approach to analytics investments across multiple enterprise departments is more important than ever before. Achieving new benefits within multiple enterprise departments require flexible visualization styles, robust insight delivery, powerful data integration, and operational scalability all while providing high confidence in security and governance. Choosing an analytics platform that truly addresses the needs of multiple types of users can deliver exponential increases in ROI and payback time. More importantly, the right choice represents the difference between delighted users and ones that feel forgotten. The market is crowded with vendors vying for your attention. It is important for you to consider these five analytics imperatives when making investments to expand the benefits of data insight amongst different groups across the enterprise. ABOUT JINFONET SOFTWARE Jinfonet empowers companies to embed the most sophisticated reports and dashboards into web applications. Through the JReport analytics platform, developers and users gain advanced visualization capabilities with any data source. Every day, JReport delivers insights for hundreds of thousands of users at over 10,000 installations worldwide jinfonet.com Jinfonet Software, Inc. All rights reserved.