Creating and viewing data in fancy charts and visuals is not why a company chooses to implement analytics. Making smarter decisions and reflecting them in business outcomes is the main reason industries across the globe want to make use of analytics and business intelligence.
Despite rapid advancement in technology and innovations like great visualizations, analytics in the cloud, self-service BI and focus shifting to data-driven workplaces, many companies have failed to realize what analytics promises to deliver. The adoption of analytics within an organization remains around 30%.
However, the story across various surveys pinpoints the same fact: Analytics is vital for a company’s success. According to the Harvard Business Review study, 89% of companies have stated that analyzing their data is important for innovation strategies.
In such a condition where there is a need to give actionable intelligence to the users but very few adoption rates, how can companies tackle this issue and be competitive at the same time? The answer lies in invisible analytics. By making employees and consumers take decisions by infusing intelligence into the applications where they work. It is important to note that we are talking about delivering analytics within the applications where workers are already present but not creating a new standalone app.
Every company has its own stories or strategies to set a path towards invisible analytics /Embedded analytics. Sometimes it is driven by customers requesting data, sometimes it is driven by the product team that decides to generate a new revenue stream or differentiate their product for faster delivery of values. In some other cases, it is driven by engineering teams and IT departments looking to increase operational efficiency.
It is always noticed that whenever a certain business unit decides to embed analytics, it soon gets adopted by other business units as well due to its outcome.
The path to deploy infused analytics can be summarized in three different steps
Step1: Removing access barriers to data and analytics
It is important to remove the access barriers and make data available. Embedding analytics overcomes this accessibility gap. Achieving it requires a threefold approach.
- Connect all data: Connect all your data sources to create and maintain a single source of truth.
- Integrate data security. Strict and granular governance across the applications and data sources.
- Deploy: CI/CD
Step 2. Reducing information and skillset gaps
To get the full value from your analytics and optimize your ROI (return on investment) it is important to encourage the adoption of analytics. A lot of BI Tools have a rigid design where it restricts users an option to access data and how the interactions must look like. Users with no Data science and analytics knowledge must be able to frame their own questions and get answers in the format they want. When business users cannot ask their own queries about the data, it can lead to increased requests to the IT/engineering/data science teams that have the expertise to answer such new questions.
By introducing augmented analytics backed up with AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning), we will have the capability to think beyond dashboards and go for descriptive visualizations and prescriptive analysis. A low code environment that enables self-service, drag and drop analytics that is usable for even the most non-technical users will close this skillset gap.
Infused analytics = accelerated analytics adoption
Infused analysis or analytics ensure to start your end users are making informed decisions backed up by a single source of truth and data. This accelerates the process of decision making which is more accurate and more effective and most importantly quick, taken at the right time.
Step 3: Promote innovation
Increasingly, organizations recognize that they have valuable data and are looking for ways to infuse that data into their product offering so that their customers see value with each interaction and have confidence in the product offering.
Companies can embed visualizations directly into the application for actionable intelligence at the right place and at the right time. It empowers the users to take actions directly from the application. Companies can promote these infused invisible analytics as their new and premium feature.
Infusing analytics turbocharges a company’s growth. Dashboards are outdated and we need analytics that is in context and customized. Dashboards are basic and ought, but infusion equals accelerating innovation and product development. Furthermore, infused analytics enable them to continue to iterate on their implementation, building upon their existing foundations so that they can innovate and scale up for future success.
