For many people, their place of work has moved much closer. The hectic rush hour on crowded roads or on packed public transport has been replaced by a quick journey along the landing or down the garden to the home office. In due course, many will return to the previous way of working in central office locations, but it seems highly likely that the “New Normal” will be marked by more people than ever before working remotely – particularly since it has only accelerated an existing trend of enabling remote workers.
We all know that many advantages are proffered for home working, and indeed I am a great fan of doing so. Of course, there is a range of technology that helps with online meetings and other forms of office communication, but there is also a danger that matters that would have been covered in the informal interaction between colleagues in an office will be missed. We no longer have the coffee machine chats, the quick conversation with the colleague at the next desk, five minutes grabbed “on the fly” with the boss, and so forth. This impacts us all but it’s especially acute among younger and, thereby, less-experienced employees. Personally, I can vividly remember in my early career how I was rescued from several professional “faux pas” after a few wise words from a more senior colleague! Would I be so fortunate now?
I have spent most of my recent career in the analytics industry, so not surprisingly my thoughts have wandered to how this challenge might play out in that world.
Let’s imagine you are searching for a report. One obvious way of starting this process would be to see if anyone has produced anything like this before, and that may likely involve asking around your office. If you are working remotely, that informal collaboration is not so easy. In today’s data-centric world, business users were already faced with the challenge of finding reports and the necessity of trying to work out which, if any, were relevant to their needs. Now that challenge is compounded because everyone is working from different locations. Enterprise data and documents are scattered all over the virtual work ecosystem. Even once access is set up to the ecosystem from remote locations, this “virtual clutter” makes it even harder to determine who owns what data or report, particularly when business users are using different BI and analytics tools.
Report clutter kills productivity. The ability to search a catalogue of reports to identify the right reports for your needs – and reports that are similar that could provide additional insights – would save you time. If you can readily see the wheel online then you won’t need to reinvent it! And wouldn’t it be even better if the available reports were rated as to their suitability for particular purposes by appropriately qualified colleagues?
These are among the business challenges that ZenOptics can help solve, thereby dramatically improving your decision-making process – regardless of where you may be working.
Find out more about how ZenOptics makes finding the right reports at the right time easier, read our white paper “Report Management in the New Normal – A Guide for COOs.”
Many thanks to Peter McQuade, vice president of Alliances and Channels at ZenOptics, for authoring this blog.
Could you deliver even more value with the analytics assets you already have in place?
The answer for many organizations is “yes.” And a logical place to start is by enabling more people throughout your organization to make decisions based on data and analytics. It’s a relatively simple model: put more resources into the hands of people who are responsible for the majority of day-to-day decisions and your organization will be situated for amplified impact.
Yet research shows that BI and analytics typically focus heavily on tech folks. In fact, Gartner shows that most initiatives focus on dedicated technologists – ignoring up to 92% of the organization’s potential users.
Many organizations try to address this through self-service, but instituting a self-service program is not enough. These initiatives commonly open up the tools to more users – which is a great start, but extending the openness of a tool or platform does not guarantee increased use. Why? Because these tools are typically not designed for the casual user. Further, multiple tools are often required for a single purpose in order to understand the analytics and the underlying context. Organizations must consider what is necessary to not only allow these users to work with analytics, but to empower them.
In short, organizations need to see any person who has to make a business decision as a viable user of analyzed data – the analytics consumer. Only when they have a clear understanding of this new persona can they align the right resources to their needs. The result will be enabled, empowered people who are focused on business outcomes.
As a best practice, when considering how to best set someone up for success, it is important to look at things through their perspective and understand their motivations, challenges, and the way they work. Analytics consumers are not the same as data folks – they have different roles, different needs, and are focused on different business outcomes. As such, It’s important to understand the unique needs of this group. What roles are these people in? What reporting/analytics needs do they have? Who do they need to collaborate with? How quickly must they have information – and make decisions based on it?
Let’s consider some of the traits of these analytics consumers are:
Considering these traits, how do you empower this diverse set of people with requirements and skills unique to their particular business roles?
First, allow users to work with the tools that meet their needs. Different BI and analytics tools are suited for different purposes. Your finance department lives in Excel, while other people consider it a necessary evil and prefer to view and assess information visually, perhaps in Tableau. Some people prefer a dashboard overview, while others want to drill into the details and mine for finer grain insights. You can empower them by simplifying their experience and allowing them to work with what is most natural and/or appropriate for their needs.
Second, allow people to seek further understanding and context if they wish. Some people can’t – or don’t want to – take information at face value. Fundamentally, analytics consumers are a procurement person, a salesperson, or a marketing person first. They need to see the analytics organized in the context of what they are trying to do – whether it is quarter close, a new customer proposal, or generating a new campaign. Here is where they have to make decisions, and this is where analytics metadata and context come in for not only common, standardized understanding but to provide an additional level of confidence in the information. Further, if there’s a question about the report/asset, the analytics consumer should easily be able to identify who the business owner of that asset may be to reach out quickly for more detail.
Third, despite how independently people may work, they usually do not work in isolation. The analytics they discover and use will be valuable to others as well. It is important to facilitate collaboration, sharing, and easy communication surrounding each of these analytics assets – or groups of assets – to scale the impact and support the decision-making process.
Empowering people with resources is not just about technology. To truly meet the needs of your analytics consumers, you need to establish a user experience that facilitates the discovery, composition, and promotion of analytics assets in intuitive ways that align to support the way people work.
Simplify Discovery and Access of assets: Often organizations think that because an individual has permissions in a tool that he or she will have everything they need. Yet that is generally not the case. One of our customers conducted a survey of their users and found that less than 20% were confident in the available current reporting and how to access it. Just because someone has access does not mean they are able to quickly assess which underlying tool they should go to for the information they need, nor that they will be able to easily identify the appropriate analytic asset for their use. Organizations can benefit from providing a single place for trusted assets to be accessed – regardless of the underlying tool or platform – so analytics consumers can quickly find and open the report, dashboard, spreadsheet, or PDF they need to do their daily work.
Compose analytics flows: Many analytics consumers have certain recurring report-related business processes they follow. For instance, end-of-month reporting will include individual reports from different regions, divisions, etc. These consumers see the analytics in the context of the processes or flows – and these processes require multiple assets and multiple sources (tools). Creating cross-platform analytics workflows can allow these people to quickly launch the series of analytics assets they need to accomplish their work. Even if it is as simple as reports that are discussed in a weekly meeting, a workflow including all the reports – ordered in the sequence of discussion – can save time and energy. More importantly, it can ensure the team and stakeholders are all working from the same information.
Scale the impact of the analytics: Providing a simple, intuitive experience for analytics consumers, sets the stage for resources to be shared and consistently, appropriately used across teams and business units. People need to collaborate to support and substantiate their decisions. And when they need more information, they need to be able to easily search for more assets, dig into the context (the analytics metadata) of the report, and mine for further intelligence.
Ultimately, by enabling more diverse users with analytics, they will be better positioned to move your business forward. ZenOptics provides an intuitive user experience for analytics consumers to easily find and use analytics in support of their daily work. Learn how by requesting a personalized demo.
Written by ZenOptics Sr. Manager, Product Marketing. Julie Langenkamp
I think we all can agree that these past two years have been ones for the history books. And if we’ve learned nothing else, it’s that we are all resilient. Amidst a global health crisis that upended everything from our personal lives to where and how we work to political and social unrest, we’ve persevered, changed, and adapted to a new world dynamics – that is here to stay.
Clearly, business is changing, too. It’s been disrupted in ways we never imagined. But throughout these dynamic times, one thing became clear: data is at the core of how we work. And analytics is the key to unlocking the value of data so your business can not just survive – but thrive – through changing times.
Unfortunately, though, too many businesses fail to go the last mile to turn their analytics strategy into an actual business strategy by ensuring that their business decision-makers have all the relevant information they need to be effective. In fact, it’s estimated that 70% of employees have access to analytics assets they shouldn’t have access to, while many other assets remain untapped by the teams that need them most. Further, less than 50% of an organization’s structured data is actively used in decision-making.
As we look ahead to 2022, it’s clear that our work to truly tap into the valuable resource of data and analytics continues. And as we close the books on yet another tumultuous year, we’ve spotted three trends that businesses now – and will continue to – face as we enter the new year. These trends will impact every business in one way or another and serve as opportunities where analytics will fuel work in ways we’ve never imagined.
For the last few decades, business leaders enjoyed an environment that was relatively stable and certain. Challenges were predictable – and largely surmountable. And environments were less volatile.
But we’ve now entered an era of uncertainty and dynamic change – an era that’s punctuated by an increasing pace of macro events that reveal new ways of organizing data and analytics with important impact on a business’ decision environment. An era where business models are changing and decentralizing, and where it’s no longer sufficient to use analytics to simply describe and diagnose results.
Consider, for example, the supply chain. Over the past few decades, companies emphasized a “just in time” strategy, which means keeping inventory to a minimum and using short-term, flexible partnership contracts that they could adjust quickly as changes in demand occurred. This strategy also moved production to low-wage locations, consolidated orders to maximize economies of scale, and minimized their physical presence in high-tax jurisdictions where possible.
While companies are not entirely abandoning their existing cost-minimizing supply chain policies, they are exploring alternative options to build more resilience at the expense of efficiency. Analytical insights are key to leading them through this learning exercise. The Financial Times recently reported on the emergence of this new “just in case” philosophy that focuses on three key principles:
All of these shifts come with new requirements for analytical capabilities to monitor and predict decisions related to their supply chain.
That’s why to succeed, today’s businesses need to be resilient so that as factors like supply chain breakdowns, the ongoing health crisis, digital privacy breaches, and political and social unrest persist, they can quickly adapt and pivot. They need to employ analytics to predict and prescribe so they can help their organizations not just navigate – but also anticipate – the rising tide of complexity and change. And businesses must continue to extend the equation of satisfying profit expectations for shareholders to other factors such as safety, health, environment, privacy, and brand by not just sustaining – but even predicting – the impact of these events.
During this time, the lion’s share of growth will be digital, where revenue is more real time, determined by customer satisfaction and sentiment and increased competition. To this end, companies must be able to read signals from all sides of the enterprise by empowering decision makers with analytical capabilities.
The global health crisis caused massive disruption for companies worldwide. Overnight, employees transitioned their workspaces from office desks to dining room tables. Supply chains fractured or came to a halt altogether. Teams became more distributed than ever before. And collaboration became even more vital.
As we enter 2022, companies will continue to explore new ways of organizing their workplace. For many, hybrid workplaces are becoming the new normal while others are electing to keep their workforce fully remote. In this new environment, collaboration evolves, too. Work will continue to be more distributed, collaborative (read: adaptive and cross-functional), and enabled by analytical capabilities. Cross-functional teams will come together for a purpose, using analytics to help them gain insight, solve challenges, and make decisions. These teams will then break apart, regrouping with others to solve different challenges.
But in this new environment, there is a shift in focus. As organizations become increasingly more complex, the focus shifts from volume to value. Instead of cross-functional teams adding to the report sprawl, leaders are challenging them to analyze what’s been created and utilize what exists, to understand the costs associated with creating new analytics assets, and to consider the full report lifecycle by knowing when to retire analytics assets that are no longer needed. Further, these teams are challenged to work in more agile ways by coming together for an outcome-based purpose and to use analytics in a meaningful way, rather than exacerbating the problem.
And that’s why I believe decision intelligence will become a key performance parameter in the future of work. Decision intelligence is the intellective skill base where advancements in the knowledge of how to use analytics to improve decision-making are made possible by the accessibility, quality, and currency of analytics assets to the business.
Sustaining a continuous flow and composability of analytics assets will enable trustworthy, meaningful, and actionable intelligence that will enable companies to explore business options and make small or large decisions across the board.
As responsibilities for decision-making become increasingly diffused across cross-functional reporting trees, mandates to procure and maintain data and analytics capabilities shift from a centralized CDO to functional leaders. And as decision-making changes to become more complex and uncertain – with calculations supplanting human judgment where possible using automation, AI, and machine learning – these functional leaders are the ones who ascertain that machine calculations are properly embedded and documented as automated components in analytics flows.
These new analytics leaders are not data scientists or even data experts. Instead, they are the consumers of the analytics assets. The ones who use them to make critical decisions. And the ones who need context and color in order to know which report they need for the job at hand.
These analytics leaders can’t wait for someone to create a report for them. Instead, they demand wide access to data and analytics so that they can drive the consumption of analytics assets. They govern these assets so that collective intelligence increases. And they confidently consolidate, reconcile, and reorganize these assets to reduce the noise caused by the proliferation of tools, reports, and other analytics assets around the organization.
As the new analytics leader rises, many companies expect CDOs to shift their focus from the data production pipeline to the analytics consumption pipeline. With an increased need for “all eyes on the ball”, functional leaders need to be more creative with exploring options that help the company as a whole thrive through uncertain times. Companies are supporting functional leaders by giving them an increased mandate for the procurement of analytics tools, education, and datasets. But at the same time, CDOs need to view these leaders as clients, and continuously redirect the data production capabilities to support their evolving analytical needs.
In addition, the lack of human capital caused by the Great Resignation further drives companies to transplant human decision-making with machine calculations. That’s why we’re seeing a rise of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence. These new capabilities will undoubtedly add on to the automated production of reports that companies need to discover and catalog.
Lastly, as the new analytics leaders rise, the data pipeline will change as well. Similar to how we saw data silos decompose into data pipelines that weave across business functions in the form of data intelligence in the 2010s, we now see a similar shift away from analytical hierarchies where analytics flows instead weave through key business objectives.
In 2022, the new analytics leaders – or flow leaders – will drive collaboration teams to discover, compose, and evaluate analytics flows around key work objectives. These flow leaders have existed implicitly but can now develop a new skill base through decision intelligence.
To address these trends, leaders in every industry must shift their thinking – from a traditional data governance model to an approach that encompasses complementary report and analytics governance. This approach will establish not just rules for data but also guardrails and safety measures that enable and empower more people to use data and analytics to create real value for their organization.
Getting there isn’t easy, but it’s possible. And to do so, leaders need three things.
First they need intent. Leaders must create a strong sense of future direction that transforms how they view data within the organization. They must see data and analytics as strategic – as a shareable and renewable resource. And they must infuse this thinking throughout the organization.
Second, they need innovation and transformation. They must encourage the adoption of new processes, structure, and technologies that aim to radically increase the analytics asset stock of the organization.
And third, leaders need to cultivate intelligence. They must create the intellective skill base, including distributive leadership and adaptive learning, to promote analytical agility and drive business innovation.
To address these three trends – and ones we cannot yet anticipate – organizations need decision intelligence. Decision intelligence enables leaders to choose the right options at scale, so their teams can navigate uncertain business waters.
ZenOptics supports companies to thrive in these uncertain business decision environments by maximizing the discoverability of the continuous stream of analytical insight across the organization, engendering new operational alternatives to existing business metrics, processes, and KPIs. To this end, ZenOptics focuses on the empowerment of flow leaders to transform their organization into the future of analytics-driven work.
So as we close the books on 2021, I encourage each of you to explore how decision intelligence can help your organization not just survive – but thrive – in 2022. You can learn more about decision intelligence by watching my keynote presentation from Differentia Day.
Ready to learn more? Register for our upcoming webinar on January 19, 3 Ways to Boost Your Analytics Action Plan Today.
Written by ZenOptics’ CTO Pieter De Leenheer
Over the past decade, the world of analytics has changed dramatically. What started out as an IT-driven effort to embrace the bundled reporting tools ERP solutions provided quickly morphed into a revolution – first with business intelligence tools and then with self-service analytics. New tools emerged like Business Objects and Cognos followed by Qlik, Tableau, and Power BI, each with the intention of putting the power of data into the hands of the business user. Decision makers were empowered to adopt the specialized tool that best met their needs. And adoption spread like wildfire.
But as business users embraced this new world of self-service reports, dashboards, and visualizations, challenges emerged. Organizations found they were using multiple BI tools across their enterprise. Reports became siloed, which added to the legacy and redundancy challenges. Analytics assets such as reports, dashboards, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs proliferated, with multiple versions living in multiple places, using data from many, often inconsistent, sources. Costs increased as more and more users came on board. And users found themselves debating decisions because they didn’t know which version of the report they based the decision on was actually correct.
The challenges spread to IT departments as well. The teams that brought in these various tools needed IT’s help managing their output. But without intimate knowledge of the tools or their outputs, being the custodian of these tools was difficult at best. In an attempt to manage the myriad of analytics assets that sprung up from every tool that came their way, many IT departments began to custom-develop “portals” to help catalog which assets lived in which systems. But these rudimentary efforts were difficult to use and time-consuming to manage and maintain, with all of the other priorities in the business.
As challenges mounted, organizations knew there must be a better way to manage the BI and analytics chaos across their organization. And with organizations feeling pressured to increase the value of the thousands of reports and supporting assets they created, time was of the essence.
But how could organizations make sense of this convoluted analytics landscape of specialized tools, embedded analytics, and Excel reports? Unlike their data and IT colleagues, these new analytics consumers live in processes – not data. They consume data in the form of reports. Or dashboards. Or visualizations. They need these analytics assets to make informed decisions, in the context of the process. And it’s critical that they feel confident that the report they are using is accurate and appropriate.
To overcome these challenges, many organizations implemented data governance and data catalogs. But these are tools for the consumers of data, including analysts and data scientists. Not those that are steeped in analytics. And while effective at cataloging data at the lowest level, governed data doesn’t matter if the report itself is incomplete, outdated, or simply inconsumable. Said differently, governed data and data catalogs alone do not address the real issue at hand: how can decision-makers consume reports in an experience designed with the analytics consumer in mind?
Decision-makers need a simple, business-friendly way to easily know which report is the one they need for the task at hand. A way to clear out the noise caused by multiple, similar versions of reports that all pull data from different, disparate sources and systems. They need visibility into where their report is coming from, so they can confidently narrow down their options to find the one they need to make critical business decisions. They need an analytics catalog. An analytics catalog helps business users access the analytics assets available across their enterprise. It provides color and context around the report so that they know they can use it to make business decisions. Without an analytics catalog and a simple unified view to take advantage of all of the analytics assets they’ve created, organizations will continuously find themselves with the inefficient report sprawl they face today. What started out as a small nucleus of core, well-defined reports inevitably morphs into a proliferation of analytics assets that are similar, yet not quite the same. They may use different data sources. Or have the same name, but use different underlying data. Or may simply be multiple versions of the same report created at different points in time.
Using an analytics catalog, analytics consumers can discover the analytics assets that best meet their needs, within an experience designed for them. They can clear the noise caused by the previous month’s reports that should have been purged (but weren’t) and old reports that are no longer accurate (or relevant). And they can access important insights from systems that were historically difficult to access or even unknown. The result is greater transparency into a shortlist of reports that business users can confidently use to make critical business decisions.
ZenOptics recognizes the challenges that the proliferation of analytics assets has caused for decision-makers and, ultimately, organizations as a whole. That’s why we developed an analytics catalog that provides a single, authoritative source for enterprise analytics assets. We use advanced integration technologies along with machine learning and AI to create an analytics catalog that brings cross-platform analytics assets together in a single interface to bridge the last mile from insights to decisions. The results? IT no longer needs to create custom “portals” to solve this challenge. And analytics consumers gain access to cross-platform analytics assets with inherited security permissions; assurance that these assets are governed and organized to flow through prescribed paths for usability; and an accelerated, consistent, efficient, and confident decision-making process.
To learn more, watch our recent webcast entitled ”The Value of an Analytics Catalogue in a Data-Driven Enterprise.”
Written by ZenOptics CEO + Co-Founder Saurbh Khera
Tool migrations can occur for a variety of reasons. The migration could be required due to budget considerations, could be tied to a particular business use case or part of corporate modernization initiatives (such as digital transformation and increasing data and analytics use), or may be part of optimizing the business intelligence and analytics ecosystem.
Migrations can be complex, time-consuming, and costly. If not appropriately planned for and handled, the upfront costs to migrate can negate the planned savings for the first couple of years. This is especially true when an organization has waited too long (i.e., past sunset date) to retire a tool or if the mapping of the old application to the new was not thoughtfully and carefully done.
The right resources must be allocated to ensure everything that is intended to be in the new tool migrates successfully. Many companies migrate everything from one tool to the next, but what is messy and out of control in the existing tool will still be messy and out of control in the next. Migrations provide an opportunity to reset. Therefore, it’s important to understand what data is being used, by whom, and where that data comes from; which reports are current, accurate, and appropriate for use; and which KPIs/expressions and metrics are relevant for the organization.
From an architectural standpoint, potential integration challenges may surface with other tools in the ecosystem. It is important to research tool and version compatibility to avoid surprises. Custom and home-grown tools also require special consideration.
Often IT will recognize the technical and integration challenges but may underestimate the human emotional component. Change management is a vital element of a successful migration because people tend to resist change and, therefore, tool adoption may be adversely impacted. It is necessary to address change management and provide communication to familiarize people with a new tool, address any concerns over new skills required, and build confidence and comfort for users of the tool.
With a thoughtful approach to migration, these challenges can be mitigated.
The first step is to clearly understand your entire current BI and analytics landscape. Which tools are being used and how often? Are all the licenses being used, and are they distributed appropriately? Which reports and dashboards are the most important for users, and how often are they used? With this visibility into how the components of the existing ecosystem are being utilized, it will be easier to determine the needs of the new tool and exactly what should be migrated to create a clean environment.
It is necessary to then establish and communicate a detailed migration plan and timeline. Decide if the migration will be done “big-bang style” or in phases, and consider the impact of each approach.
One helpful approach is to adopt an analytics catalog to facilitate and assist the migration. An analytics catalog will deliver the visibility of the ecosystem and the analytics assets in the various tools. It will also establish a single access point for end-users for all their BI and analytics information, regardless of which tool the content exists in. Creating this view will ease the change management challenges because users need not worry about the underlying source system for their report; they access everything through a single pane of interaction. This Increases productivity and efficiency for end-users – even during migration – and sustains a familiar look and feel to ease concerns during the transition. Further, this allows IT and users to reconcile and validate that everything they need is in the new platform.
It is also beneficial to find a trusted implementation partner that is familiar with the environment, overarching strategy, and current/future needs of the organization to facilitate the transition, training, and adoption. Take advantage of experts who are available to guide and assist.
The right resources can set the stage for a successful migration. ZenOptics is a web application that brings BI and analytics assets into an analytics catalog and single pane of interaction to help ease the pain of migrations. ZenOptics can ease migrations through:
Plus, ZenOptics’ respected partners – like InfoZone – help organizations with strategic implementations and current/future migration plans, setting the stage for long-term success.
Migration work is never fully done. The pace of business today will continually drive change, newer or preferred tools will come along, the organization will prioritize new initiatives, and disruptive factors may change the landscape. The important thing is to always set the stage for the future and establish a migration strategy that applies to current and future scenarios while creating consistency and ease of use for businesspeople.
Learn more about how ZenOptics can help with tool migrations and unified access to cross-platform analytics assets here.
(Originally published as a guest blog by InfoZoneUS.com.)
Global analyst firm Gartner has unveiled its “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends in Data and Analytics for 2021.” It expects data and analytics worlds to “collide,” creating convergences in technologies, the roles of data and analytics workers, and processes. By 2023, decision intelligence will be a focus for many with more than 33% of large organizations expected to have analysts practicing decision intelligence, including decision modeling.
During the most recent Gartner Symposium, research VP Rita Sallam, presented that by 2023, 95% of Fortune 500 companies will have converged analytics governance into broader data and analytics strategic initiatives as part of an enterprise information strategy.
“Analytics” is how people use insights from data to inform decision-making and achieve business objectives. “Governance” establishes guidelines and guardrails to ensure your data and analytic processes are being deployed as efficiently as possible. “Analytics governance” is a modern, redefined governance for enabled users that ensures information is both trusted and utilized properly throughout the analytics lifecycle. Similarly, “report governance” focuses on accurate, appropriate use of information for decision-making.
According to McKinsey, executives in every industry must shift from a data-governance model of loosely followed guidelines to report and analytics governance that makes the most of how people use data and analytics to create value.
Although the current users of big data and big analytics are primarily big corporations, reports and analytics governance could be equally advantageous in assisting decision-makers of small-to-medium-sized businesses across industries.
Structured use of data. With analytics governance, you can establish procedures and guidelines that ensure your analytics activities align with an enterprise information strategy. By establishing processes and organization structures, you can be certain that people recognize the importance of governance roles and their work is respected.
Simplified compliance. Whether regulated by industry watchdogs, by government, or self-regulated, analytics governance is a critical aspect of ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements.
Better decision-making. As with any organization, well-governed reports and analytics are better understood, more reliable, and more discoverable – making it easier for users to pull trusted, relevant, and useful data. This allows you to drive more business value from your data, as well as ensure clear accountability and ownership for more productive and confident decision-making.
Reduced risks. All the aforementioned benefits of analytics governance lead to improved operational efficiencies and reduced risks.
Getting started with report and analytics governance initiatives can seem daunting, and similar efforts often go amiss. Whether you are a traditional incumbent company or an emerging start-up, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. ZenOptics can help you establish and grow your governance program
ZenOptics’ Enterprise Decision Platform provides:
Powerful Metadata. Report usage metadata can show that a particular author develops reports that are frequently used. ZenOptics’ enterprise decision platform enables access to reusable, active metadata that can improve trust in information and reduce time to data delivery.
Certified Reports. Business users will benefit from a governed environment that offers automation with workflows and report certification for driving decisions.
Continuous Compliance. ZenOptics can help you navigate operational decision complexities, including adherence to regulations by practicing compliance-centric reporting.
While the benefits of analytics governance will differ for each organization, there is predictable business value it can deliver: improve decision-making processes that will drive sound business outcomes.
Are you ready to explore ZenOptics’ decision confidence platform and learn how it can influence business outcomes and behavior in your organization? Request a demo today.
Saying that “Data is king” still holds. Now more than ever, people are generating huge amounts of data every day—from social media to the Internet of Things (IoT) people have at their homes or offices. With the exponential growth of connected products and almost 4.57 billion active internet users, data creation is only poised to grow more as time goes by.
All of this data contributes to the wealth of enterprise information that organizations can analyze to find insights. A cohesive business intelligence and analytics environment that provides visibility into all enterprise information and reports will help businesspeople be able to deliver value from these analytic assets.
Further, since traditional data governance is designed to control only a small, critical subset of data, it is no longer sufficient in today’s massive data landscape. Organizations need a governed environment – encompassing all enterprise information and reports – where analysts and businesspeople can benefit from trusted data as they make operational decisions and do their daily work.
According to an IDC survey, more than half of businesses indicated a lack of trust in the results of their data analysis, as more and more data users are exploring various analytics tools without a proper governance perspective. Difficulty in keeping a unified approach in this complex landscape may result in more serious consequences for non-compliance.
Thus, organizations need to look beyond traditional data governance. In this age of modern data and analytics, a change of mindset is necessary—that which not only focuses on data but also on its reporting and analytics.
ZenOptics’ Decision Confidence Platform presents three keys on how to have a governed environment that will drive better decisions for your organization.
Empowering your businesspeople and analysts with a governed reporting environment of all enterprise information assets will not only drive better decisions but also ensure standardization and consistency as information is used from across the enterprise. To learn more, request a demo today!
Digitalization has given rise to innovations in technology to keep up with the rapid growth of data, as well as help turn this vast amount of data into insights. From traditional spreadsheets to Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, organizations today are transforming their businesses to be data-driven. Research shows that the Business Intelligence market is projected to reach $39.35 billion by 2027. Part of the BI market growth is due to the increasing adoption of self-service BI and reporting solutions that empower business people to work with their respective data independently with minimal help from IT.
The proliferation of reporting tools makes it possible for more and more people to access multiple BI applications so they can view and manipulate their reports. But as the number of applications increases, the number of risks also rises. Multiple applications mean multiple reports existing in multiple, isolated systems which can lead eventually to inconsistent information.
Gartner’s research shows that while Business Intelligence solutions have been around for quite some time, user adoption is still hovering at only 30 percent. These numbers show the gap between the data and information that is available for analytics and software user adoption to conduct the analysis. If people do not know the reports exist in a BI tool, then the proliferation of BI reporting tools potentially creates more challenges than it addresses.
There are numerous reasons why reports can remain unused, but the most notable ones are:
When reports exist in disparate systems, it creates an incomplete picture of enterprise information, thus reducing users’ confidence in BI reports.
It is not enough to just provide report users with BI tools to help with their data. Poor user adoption usually stems from not having enough communication with them during the implementation stage. For this reason, the low adoption rate can be caused by the following:
Report users must familiarize themselves with the reporting tool. If users do not have enough knowledge on how to use the BI tool, then they will just remain with the status quo.
According to Bain’s survey, 66% of executives report that digital disruption and software solutions are rapidly changing the rules of competition. However, there is still major concern about increasing user adoption so that the tools can turn data into a competitive advantage. Thus, it is paramount to consult report users that directly use the BI reporting tool. If report users think that such a tool is just an additional step to their work routine, they may not see its value.
In order to maximize the investment in BI solutions and increase adoption, it is important to simplify the experience for the user. Providing a single pane of interaction for businesspeople to seamlessly switch from one tool to another and access information from across the enterprise BI and analytics ecosystem is a must. ZenOptics addresses the problems caused by too many BI tools and disparate data sources. It provides a single interface to connect to all analytics assets with portal-like capabilities and establishes an analytics catalog, governance, and statistics to guide the usage of information. The ZenOptics Decision Confidence Platform makes it possible to have frictionless access to cross-platform information assets so report users can significantly enjoy better governance, control, and visibility with just a single point of access as they make business decisions.
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When it comes to business, decision-making is a crucial task, but it is also one of the most difficult. Data-driven organizations recognize the importance of using the right data at the right time to make decisions, but finding and accessing that data can be a challenge when vital pieces of information are scattered among disparate BI and analytics platforms in the organization. These information silos create challenges and introduce uncertainty in the decision-making process.
As companies empower employees with BI and analytics to work with data, what often happens is that the number of tools and applications in the ecosystem grows rapidly due to infrastructure needs and preferences. This creates siloed information and a lack of visibility into all the analytics assets that exist and are available – and often necessary – to make decisions. So what exactly are the problems that arise from having disparate systems?
Inefficiency. The ease of doing any given task largely depends on whether or not you have reasonable access to your tools. In 2018, a study conducted by Braintree said that employees use 10-15 applications on average for their work. These employees lose valuable time not only switching between platforms and signing in to each, but this also disrupts thought processes and requires refocused attention to proceed with the intended task. This is just a peek into the inefficiency that happens when a business contends with information scattered in disparate systems. Wouldn’t it be better to provide a single point of access to allow employees to seamlessly view and use all the information assets of the company?
Vulnerability. The more complex the decision, the more risk can be introduced in the process. Each added step or connection not only wastes time, it increases the likelihood of something going wrong. At best, this could simply cause a misstep or give your company a minor headache. The worst that could happen is you’ll have a disaster in your hands. Simplifying the decision-making process with a platform that provides guardrails and assurances can reduce the vulnerability.
Poor Decisions. Frequent, consistent operational decisions are necessary in order to run the business well. Without access to all the relevant information to make operational decisions, companies risk making bad decisions and pushing the organization forward perhaps in the wrong direction. When you have a clear picture into all the appropriate factors impacting your business decisions, you are better able to position yourself for the best possible outcomes and be competitive for the future. Recognizing the analytic assets available to you is part of confidently moving forward.
Unnecessary Spending. At the end of the day, every factor that can affect your operations shifts your profits and bottom line. And most of those listed above can really pull you down. It costs a pretty penny to deal with disparate systems, so. This is another area where a single platform that catalogs cross-platform analytic assets and supplies usage statistics will pay off.
ZenOptics presents concrete solutions to the problems caused by siloed, isolated BI and analytics. It supports operational decision making by providing a single point of access to information, an analytics catalog with associated metadata from the source systems, report and analytics governance, and usage statistics for optimizing the environment. Using the ZenOptics Decision Confidence Platform, decision-makers can enjoy simplified access to information, visibility into all the information available, and the guardrails of a governed environment.
The ZenOptics Decision Confidence Platform is based on three major pillars:
Access. With the integration established by smart connectors, ZenOptics ensures that customers are able to easily retrieve relevant information, regardless of which platform it exists within. ZenOptics gives you better insight through a catalog of information assets, automated metadata, and inherited security and authorizations for smooth access.
Assure. It’s not enough to have data available. It’s also crucial to organize and govern these assets so that they flow through prescribed paths for usability. ZenOptics gives you the ability to certified reports, map ideal workflows, deliver recommendations, and even standardize terms with BI glossary.
Accelerate. The features within the acceleration layer contribute to a consistent, efficient decision-making process for you. This is perfect for collaboration and communication between teams or for setting “favorites” for a personalized work experience. Other features available are workflow automation, usage statistics, and cross-platform search.
Among those who will benefit from this are business users and analysts, BI stewards, and IT Management. ZenOptics can deliver increased productivity and confidence in decision-making, a governed environment for driving decisions, and financial optimization of BI and Analytics investments.
People create around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and that rate of data creation grows at an incredible rate. This incredible amount translates to… more data than businesses can ever hope to handle without the right tools. Thankfully, technology does not disappoint in granting enterprises the tools that they need to harness all these bytes into pieces of information that drive business decisions and increase the potential for growth. One of the best of these tools is Business Intelligence (BI).
In the 1960s, Business Intelligence was defined as a system for information-sharing within organizations. Two decades after, it developed into the early model of its current iteration: modes for data-centric decision-making alongside computer models. Today, it is a specific offering that is designed to help businesses take advantage of data — the priceless new commodity — to:
However, BI does not always have a streamlined process to follow. Further, many organizations have multiple BI and analytics tools across the enterprise. Businesses with disparate data in these different tools still need to access and understand the information across these silos to ensure proper and comprehensive analyses. Failing to do so not only delivers poor ROI on your BI investment, it can hinder the organization’s ability to make informed decisions.
For virtually every business, disparate data is an inevitability. Different departments need different information, which results in the generation of different data assets. Similarly, some organizations still use legacy systems, which house their data. In addition, onboarding several enterprise applications onto your IT infrastructure will clog up your data pipelines and leave you with a lot to work with.
If your BI ecosystem cannot deal with disparate data, your business stands at risk of:
ZenOptics’ platform provides direct access to all of your analytics assets, including reports, dashboards, spreadsheets, applications, and data, even if they are from disparate systems.
Our platform is engineered to provide a single interface to quickly view the reports from disparate analytic resources across the enterprise. This increases productivity for knowledge workers who use multiple analytic platforms daily, improves efficiency for information stewards who govern analytics and data assets, and assists IT management who oversee the TCO of analytic and reporting systems. Its features include:
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