For over 20 years, I have immersed myself in the world of data and analytics. And during that time, data and analytics have changed. A lot. I’m sure many of you remember the days when reporting was tied to your ERP system. If you used IBM’s ERP, then naturally you used Cognos for reporting. Or if you used SAP, then you used Business Explorer or Business Objects.
But then self-service BI, analytics, and visualization tools began to emerge. And organizations shifted from a single tool reporting solution to a best-of-breed approach, where users and departments selected the tool best suited for their needs. Shadow IT emerged during this time, and their role was to enable and support these self-service tools.
As a result of the self-service evolution in BI and analytics, many organizations also embarked on a journey of business and data transformation. And they were all looking to solve the same challenges: How do I drive adoption of all these analytics tools? How can I help users find what they need quickly and trust it? And how do I ensure analytics doesn’t become an afterthought – for leadership and for end-users?
Simply put: how can I ensure that my organization is getting the most value out of our data?
Organizations made many attempts to solve these challenges. Some organizations built data warehouses, data pipelines, data lakes, data fabric, data meshes, and/or invested in data governance. And while these efforts tackled some of the core tenets of data management for data producers and consumers, the core challenge remained: are analytics reaching the consumers who need them most?
The short answer is NO. In fact, according to Gartner, most organizations focus their analytics efforts toward technologists, who make up only a small subset of the people with analytics needs in an organization. The research shows that 92% of the potential analytics consumers may be neglected when it comes to working with analytics tools and resources.
So how can organizations solve this challenge? How can they ensure that all users can find the analytics assets that they need to make informed decisions? How can you make sure that the data strategy is supported by an overarching information strategy?
This challenge certainly isn’t new. But how organizations solve this challenge needs to change. And that’s where ZenOptics comes in.
ZenOptics knows that in order for analytics consumers to make informed decisions, they need to know which report is right. That’s why we’ve designed our solutions with the analytics consumer in mind. By giving analytics consumers a simple way to determine which report is the right report, they can clear out the noise caused by numerous, similar versions of reports that pull data from disparate sources and systems. And they can gain visibility into where the report is coming from so that they can confidently choose the one they need for the task at hand. Let’s take a closer look.
ZenOptics provides a unified view of analytics assets that curates the information a user needs to accelerate decision-making. As a personalized “report catalog” delivered via a highly customizable dashboard, users can discover and access analytics content through favorites as well as within categories and workflows.
ZenOptics Dashboard Example
From reports and dashboards to Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs, users gain understanding through analytics metadata about these assets, allowing them to answer questions such as:
ZenOptics allows users to take discoverability to the next level through intelligence. Using keyword search capabilities, users can correlate assets through metadata, identifying traits such as the type of report (Finance vs. Sales), which system it came from (Salesforce vs. Cognos), whether the asset is certified or not, and how many users view/use the asset. Users can also discover other, related assets that exist in other systems or other parts of the organization – and if they don’t have access to the asset, they can initiate a process to request it, right from their search results.
ZenOptics Search Example
As analytics assets proliferate, another challenge facing users is redundancy. How can a user feel confident that the report they are using is the most accurate, most up-to-date version?
Because ZenOptics provides a unified view of assets regardless of the source system, users become aware of potential redundancies. Matching capabilities use algorithms to flag similar or duplicate reports based on metadata. Then, users can alert analytics producers to these potential duplicates so they can help determine which one is right or most recent. Analytics producers can then apply governance principles to certify the content at the time of curation.
This process allows business users to optimize their experience by choosing to work with only certified content (clearly identified with blue check marks), which gives them confidence that the asset they are using is right and appropriate for its intended purpose. This curated, personalized view is not only trustworthy, but also more efficient, helping users to quickly and confidently access the insights they need to drive better decision making.
Once users have a curated, unified view of relevant and appropriate assets for their work, then they can then focus on composability. By composing their own workflows, they can easily enable one-click access to the analytics assets that optimize their existing business processes. For example, finance users responsible for month-end close can compose a workflow that includes the reports, external links, internal and external apps, and database views needed throughout the month-end close process, regardless of the underlying tool in which the asset resides. By adding these analytics assets into a flow, they can easily and efficiently gather the data and insights needed to complete the process in a consistent, standardized, and efficient way.
Making use of analytics is not just about tech capabilities or processes; roles and people are key to the success of an analytics strategy. While many organizations rely on their business users and analytics producers to manage and maintain analytics assets, other organizations are finding that having an analytics business partner is key to their success. An analytics business partner understands both sides of the organization – business and technical. They help translate business needs into technical requirements and garner respect from both business and tech folks because of their ability to understand the technicalities and nuances on both sides. Because of this unique blend of skills and knowledge, they are able to work alongside analytics users to support them throughout the process – from identifying data elements through to decision making.
These analytics business partners are responsible for managing the platform, bridging the gap between business needs and increasing consumption. And they support business users as they curate content into categories and workflows within their trusted unified view.
You may find that individuals with these skills already exist within your organization. And if they do, I suggest formalizing their role. But if they don’t, consider hiring someone with a blend of functional and technical expertise to support your users.
ZenOptics recognizes the challenges that the proliferation of analytics assets has caused for organizations. Using advanced integration technologies along with machine learning and AI, ZenOptics creates an analytics catalog that brings cross-platform analytics assets together in a unified view that goes the last mile – closing the gap between insights and decisions. And when businesses adopt an analytics catalog that provides a single, unified view for enterprise analytics assets, they improve access to critical insights, increase assurance that the information is right, and accelerate decision making across the organization.
Ready to learn more? Request a demo.
Written by ZenOptics Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Heena Sood.
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
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 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%. 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 who 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.
To request a demo, connect with our BI experts today!
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 on your hands. Simplifying the decision-making process with a platform that provides guardrails and assurances can reduce 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 of 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 ZenOptics, decision-makers can enjoy simplified access to information, visibility into all the information available, and the guardrails of a governed environment.
The ZenOptics 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 certify 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 platform 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.
With the massive leaps that technology has taken over the decades, managing business has become vastly different. In a lot of ways, access to more advanced tools—the least of which is the internet—has made life easier for business owners and leaders. However, this has also given people much more complexity to cope with.
It’s not entirely accurate to say that business intelligence (BI) environments in the past were simple. Various industries have always had to deal with some sort of complexity, including unexpected challenges or problems that pop up. One of the main differences between then and today is the sheer amount of information that businesses have to deal with. What used to be simple systems and interactions before have grown complex partly and ironically because of the technology intended to simplify things in the first place.
As one example, consider a small bakery. Such a business 30 years ago would have been concerned about comparatively fewer things. This may include inventory, employee salary, ingredients, other expenses, and profit. Nowadays, it would also have to deal with social media pages, walk-in sales vs. online orders, Yelp reviews, CCTV security, and other concerns on top of those previously listed. It doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten harder, just more complex. This is especially true for bigger companies that deal with more diverse industries.
One of the reasons for unnecessary complexity is report duplication. There are several reasons why this happens, but generally, this stems from systems growing more advanced and starting to interconnect with each other. And when there are several points generating and storing information, it often results in data being unnecessarily duplicated.
It may seem like duplicate data will have little effect on an organization. After all, there’s a saying that goes, “It’s better to have and not need, than need and not have.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t really apply in the business world where almost everything has a corresponding cost. The fact is, report duplication can have severe repercussions, including inefficiency, poor cost management, unnecessary data storage, and ineffective customer service.
In order to deal with duplicate data and reports, it is necessary to be able to recognize them first. There are a few ways to make this easier:
Standardize. It’s easier to handle multiple streams of data when all the people and divisions within an enterprise are guided by the same standards. Aside from this, streamlining the workflow will also help identify and remove operational overlaps that may be causing duplicate reporting.
Merge related data. Establishing connections between records should be the first step to take before either deleting or merging them. The latter is usually preferable, given that there is inherent value in all kinds of data. Having a single master record is better than having several separate but related files.
A BI Platform enables you to collate, organize, and analyze data from different sources. This will allow you to more easily identify duplicate reports and take steps to remove redundancies or merge data as necessary. You can get direct access to all analytics assets, giving you better visibility and allowing you to address problems like distributed or duplicate reporting.
Complexity has always been a constant when it comes to business. And when it comes to business intelligence, the best way to address this complexity is to understand what kind of data you have and organize them so they are as simple and straightforward as possible.
Tools like the ZenOptics analytics catalog are invaluable when it comes to navigating today’s complex BI environment. They enable productivity, collaboration, manageability, and governance. And ultimately, these tools allow businesses to drastically reduce costs and improve their number one priority: the bottom line.
We have various plans that can be tailor-fit to your specific needs. Contact us today!
