BPM Analytics
Is this the end of standalone analytics?
Today we deal with a sea of terms related to analytics - business intelligence (BI), data visualization, data mining, among others. Essentially, analytics has evolved a lot in the last few years. Cloud-based analytics, predictive analytics, and forecasting are all exciting, but what matters to business users is not just insights but the ability to make rapid decisions. Business users are providing the impetus for on-demand data analytics and data visualizations.
The challenges of standalone analytics
Standalone analytics platforms analyze data originating from many sources. Standalone business intelligence platforms are complex applications that analyze data from a host of sources and prepares reports and dashboards for power users and CxOs. These applications work well in traditional business environments.
While self-service BI applications have, to some extent, led to data-driven decision making, mining big data requires a more complex technology infrastructure, expertise, and a greater budget. Facebook and Amazon are examples of organizations that have taken advantage of analytics and raced miles ahead of competition.
Only 20% of business executives trust their data, often because of its poor quality. The bottom line is that besides big budgets, businesses also need measures of governance and the know-how to leverage the data to take necessary actions.
While standalone dashboards may offer great insights, business executives lament the lack of actionable insights, and often face multiple versions of the truth leading to confusion. Eliminating redundancy, consolidating reports, and using certified data sources are some ways to mitigate these challenges.
Actionable insights matter
Today, analytics requires to be more real-time, enabling people to gather relevant insights and take appropriate actions. More and more companies are realizing that collaboration needs to be enabled by “active” BI. This will provide a networked and connected business environment through collaborative and seamless interactions, powered by digital tools and technologies.*
One way to quickly capitalize on data is to use Analytics as a Service(AaaS). This offers several advantages:
- Low cost of ownership
- Access to domain and technical experts
- Personalized and actionable insights and data visualizations on demand
- Better customer experience
- Ability to rapidly scale up to the demands of an ever-changing landscape
Embedded analytics enables analytical functions and data visualizations to seamlessly integrate with regular-use business applications. For the end-user, there should be no distinction between the application and business analytics. Embedding analytics in existing BPM operations lets businesses derive insights from current data sets. Providing analytics in the host application offers many benefits. Personalized and actionable insights in context, during a process, increase both efficiency and productivity. AaaS and embedded analytics also enable organizations to be more agile to the rapidly changing business environment.
Analytics - not just for the upper crust
According to Gartner, the worldwide social software and collaboration market is expected to continue in a double-digit growth trajectory through 2022. Companies need to cater to a distributed and remote workforce using technology to facilitate information sharing and BI.
Business executives need to be able to think on their feet and make decisions in real time. They should be able to pull up charts and derive insights on-the-go; they also need to pin these insights on apps or insert them into presentations for any upcoming event. Customer representatives may need revenue alerts, and clients request real-time updates all the time. BI should become a natural part of everyday user workflows, thereby accelerating business efficiency.
A business user is not particularly enamored with the “how” of data analytics. What matters is the insights that can be garnered, actions that can be taken, and whether the actions can be taken on time.
From data to action
To achieve market differentiation and digital growth, businesses should be able to leverage data as an asset. Organizations need to empower employees across levels, so that they can make data-driven decisions fostering insights-driven business. While standalone analytics was a good start, it falls short in a fast-changing agile ecosystem which has a distributed and remote workforce.
Infosys BPM offers Analytics as a Service (AaaS) and embedded analytics via Infosys Insights Factory, which is equipped with industry leading tools and technologies, best-in-class practices, and domain expertise to deliver personalized analytics to every personasolutions, enabling data-driven, democratic, smart decisions.
BI success is achieved by data governance over a distributed but unified data set and easily-operable user interfaces, which ensure data security and privacy. It’s a tall order, but it’s worth it.
* For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
