Use Cases

ZenOptics Analytics Hub is used by enterprises across many different industries to help them solve specific data and analytics challenges.

Here are the top use cases delivering the most value for our customers.

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Modernization

As organizations look to modernize their existing BI and analytics environments, the ZenOptics platform provides meaningful ways for organizations to realize greater value from their data and analytics investments through the following use cases:

Most companies have reporting environments with various BI tools and applications. With thousands of analytics assets spread across multiple tools, business users don’t know where to find the information they need for analysis and decision-making. This causes uncertainty, frustration, and lost productivity.

ZenOptics solves these problems by:
  • Delivering a single sign-on experience to access all reports across all tools and applications
  • Providing an intuitive interface of curated, approved analytics assets
  • Facilitating seamless navigation between multiple reports and dashboards for easy discovery and access to information
  • Enabling search capabilities across all reporting tools and applications
  • Creating visibility and discovery of additional valuable information, including contextual descriptions and lineage

With self-service BI and analytics, the volume of reports and dashboards increases dramatically over time. Further, the reports existing in the ecosystem often remain unmanaged over time as people rarely retire unused or outdated assets.

As a result, people can’t find the information they’re looking for or – worse – select a report that hasn’t been validated, which undermines the integrity of the overall reporting environment.

ZenOptics allows organizations to:
  • Access the complete inventory of reports and usage, with visibility across disparate tools in the ecosystem
  • Identify potential duplicate or redundant reports
  • Highlight report usage to reveal unused or infrequently used analytic assets
  • Easily discover existing assets through enterprise-wide search – thereby preventing report duplication requests and wasted efforts
  • Support a standardized report lifecycle management process to ensure information is valid and appropriate for use

Key Performance Indicators are essential measures to evaluate and manage the performance of enterprise activities and operations. Executive teams, managers, and stakeholders all need to easily access these measures in a consistent, organized manner to create standardization and common understanding across the enterprise.

Inconsistencies with KPI definitions and calculations cause wasted time spent resolving misunderstandings and disputes - not to mention the risk of incorrect decisions about performance.

ZenOptics solves this problem with a KPI Library, allowing:
  • Users to streamlined, personalized KPI dashboard for intuitive assessment of their essential measures from a variety of sources
  • KPI definition standardization and certification through a stewardship and governance process
  • KPIs to be cataloged and associated with every analytic asset (e.g., report, dashboard, etc.) in which that measure is used
  • Users to identify “related reports” to establish linkages between relevant analytic assets

As organizations modernize their BI and analytics environments, new tools are often introduced and legacy tools may be retired. This is a complicated and time-consuming process, as organizations try to understand and address the incredible volumes of existing analytics assets.

ZenOptics helps organizations:
  • Visualize which BI tools and applications are being used most frequently
  • Understand the frequency of report, dashboard, and document usage
  • Provide information to drive prioritization and consolidation
  • Compare and contrast reports with side-by-side viewing to reconcile and validate information
  • Accelerate adoption and ease change management by giving users seamless functionality of reports and tools as the migration occurs
  • Future-proof the point of access for BI and analytics assets by establishing one stop for reports, dashboards, and documents

Transformation

As organizations plan to transform the way they do business, the following use cases describe how ZenOptics platform helps to facilitate those efforts:

An enterprise data and analytics marketplace is the bridge between a data catalog and an analytics catalog so that report producers, business analysts, managers and executives have a single virtual repository for accessing data sets and analytics assets.

Data catalogs are highly technical applications that are built primarily for data engineers. They are complex, technical solutions that most business analysts would struggle to work with.

The ability to combine data sets within the business-user-focused Analytics Catalog enables organizations to have a full marketplace of data and analytics resources.

ZenOptics connects analytics and data sources, thereby:
  • Providing individuals in various roles the ability to examine the data sets involved in reports and KPIs
  • Visibility across BI tools, analytics applications, and data sets
  • Extending data catalog functionality for extended lineage and metadata visibility
  • Facilitating the discovery of additional information in related data sets for analysis purposes
  • Establishing auditability and traceability from report to source

Defined business processes are the foundation for organizations to run smoothly and scale effectively. Ensuring that the same reports are easily accessible and used consistently over time is critical – especially for processes such as regulatory reporting. Yet it is inefficient, time-consuming, and potentially inconsistent when manual effort is required to gather data from disparate sources. This increases the risk of errors and incorrect information being used for analyses and decision-making.

ZenOptics solves this problem by:
  • Automating standardized report groupings into Workflows to ensure the appropriate reports and information are used for decisions
  • Providing one-click access to launch sets of reports that consist of analytics assets from across the enterprise
  • Enabling consistency and transparency between team members and functions through shared Workflows
  • Facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing among team members assigned to the same Workflow
  • Delivering a predefined set of resources for easy knowledge transfer and onboarding

Organizations realize that data governance is a component to ensure people use the right information to make informed decisions. Beyond the data itself, an ungoverned reporting environment creates report sprawl and introduces risk and uncertainty when accessible reports may be inaccurate, outdated, or inappropriate for certain uses.

Governing the lifecycle of analytics resources is a disjoined process, and without visibility into the usage, relevance, and appropriateness of the information, it’s difficult for a governance program to be successful and sustainable.

ZenOptics' Report Governance:
  • Provides report usage statistics for insight into the activities within the analytics environment, with TCO and licensing analysis
  • Facilitates hygiene of the reporting environment by revealing which assets should be retired/removed
  • Enables certification through a customizable, standardized review and approval process
  • Enables business users to make decisions with confidence based on accurate and appropriate information
  • Provides the ability to rate and provide feedback on reports for crowdsourced improvement

Integrating information from multiple organizations into a single view of the combined enterprise is challenging and complex. Each organization has its own set of data and analytics – including the tools, structures, and processes – that must be rationalized and combined.

This creates a challenge within the combined organization of how to make data-driven decisions when visibility about what data exists and where to find it is disjointed. Further, business users have difficulty finding their reports as the systems integrate over time. And when the reports aren’t easily discoverable, new ones (duplicates) are often created – taxing the BI teams with redundant work and creating more reporting chaos.

With ZenOptics, organizations can:
  • Obtain visibility across the multiple data and analytics applications to provide understanding of the existing assets in the separate ecoysystems
  • Initially combine the results of each separate entity for cohesive information access all in one interface
  • Facilitate access to information for combined entity reporting
  • Simplify migration and business-user change management as integration progresses over time
  • Conduct side-by-side review and validation of reporting information