Ending 20+ Years of Business Intelligence Struggle Via Agile Systems

Hype about the ‘game changing’ benefits of business intelligence tools from marquee IT brands began more than 20 years ago. Businesses across verticals have been struggling to realize those benefits since then. If Gartner is to be believed, less than 30% of an organization’s potential users actually use BI solutions.

Traditional BI – Complicated, Expensive and Rigid

Low adoption of traditional BI systems is attributed not only to complex stages of implementation, but also their usage. For instance, mapping an FMCG brand’s sales performance to geography, gender, product, retailer etc. for multidimensional insights requires proficiency in a querying language like SQL in conjunction with MOLAP, ROLAP or HOLAP technologies.

Deployment of traditional BI tools is at the cost of an organization’s two most expensive assets – Time & Highly Qualified IT Resources. This works against the real time challenges of working in today’s fast paced competitive environment.

Today’s highly mobile business leaders require insights at their fingertips. Traditional tools fail to deliver them because they are designed to answer pre-defined questions. Incorporating new insights from new data sources warrant significant, not to mention expensive changes to system architecture.

Traditional systems are a strain on operational efficiency

Since BI systems built on the back of traditional data warehouses rely on historical data, it makes countering real-time competitive challenges hard to deal with. The ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process of updating the warehouse with latest data has the propensity to suffer due to people inefficiencies and faulty processes which can severely impact business processes.

In other words, if you want real-time insights, you cannot count on traditional systems. Needless to say, they are hopelessly inept at frequently updating the information system as it would require regular removal and addition of data.

Although potentially every business user can put business intelligence to good use, they are at the mercy of scarce IT resources for doing so. For instance, retail category managers can be more productive if they can pin down the buying behavior behind their highest selling items. It will help them spot cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

Agile BI solutions are the way forward

Agile systems adapt to the changing business landscape by complementing rather that strictly replacing traditional systems. Historical insights from a traditional BI system can be combined with real-time capabilities of agile systems to deliver the most potent business insights. They can take full advantage of the benefits afforded to them big data technologies.

Let’s say a supermarket chain decides to use beacon technology to geo-target its shoppers, an agile BI system can effortlessly integrate their real-time browsing behavior to their purchase history and send highly relevant push notifications. So a customer with a regular history of buying sweet spreads will get instant notification about Nutella’s latest offer if he/she is found loitering in the ‘Jams and Spreads isle’. Moreover, decision makers can use interactive dashboards to discover previously unknown correlations like the tendency of Nutella buyers to purchase milk, four, eggs, berries and green tea.

Agile BI solutions facilitate faster and wider user adoption as they require no more technical expertise than operating a computer or a smartphone. Such business tools come at a fraction of the cost of traditional BI systems and require no installation, plus their deployment is effortless and quick. They are a ‘must-have’ for decision makers and influencers who are on the frontlines of organizational excellence.

For more information about MoData offerings click here

It’s Not About Data, It’s About Insights and Impact

The best vision is insight.

– Malcolm Forbes

And yet in the jargon laden world of big data analytics actionable insights are as difficult as driving through thick fog. Business users shouldn’t be bothered about understanding the magnanimity of data or the various technologies that come into play.

Users for most part want solutions that do what they are supposed to without getting people to jump through hoops in the process. Time is money and if they have to rely on the IT department to get competitive real-time insights they are not going to see any of it. Such is the importance of data-driven decisions that one study has found improving customer relationships (55%) and making the business more data-focused (53%) as the top two business goals.

The traditional route to generating insights way is like peeling back layers of an onion.

When you greet someone with a casual ‘How are you’, you don’t want tiny details about everything they did from the moment they woke up until they met you. Unfortunately, thanks to cumbersome processes and protocols the traditional approach is somewhat like that. For instance, a business user from an insurance brokerage firm may want to analyze and compare insurance settlements across 10 different cities. He would have to shoot a mail to the IT department for the same.

This traditional approach would involve a lot of back and forth emails across the organization for clearances and access to data that might be deemed sensitive. The next steps would then involve manually cleaning the data and running queries to generate insights. All of which comes at the cost of time, money and involvement of multiple individuals for a request made by one person.

Insights and impact now go hand in hand

Whether B2B or B2C, there is no business that is untouched by fierce competition. Top players from every sector are thriving on the back of their ability to generate insights, act and realize the outcome in quick succession.

A streamlined solution that aggregates data from all possible sources and processes them at lightning speed is the new way of doing business. For this reason, big data platforms and applications have now gone mainstream. The biggest advantage such solutions provide businesses is that they bring insights to their fingertips, quite literally.

Big data solutions that are responsive to changing business needs are need of the hour

When we say ‘changing business needs’, we are really talking about the many course corrections business users will make in their heads. In other words, the one insight they originally set out to acquire will almost certainly lead to more questions. Let’s go back to the insurance settlement example, the business user may have more of such questions – Why is the average settlement in City A the highest? Is it because of a unique set of underwriters? Which underwriter is making the highest payouts? Is it possible that of all 10 cities, City A has the highest hooliganism-related payouts? Such insights have a real impact on business decisions.

Businesses need solutions that can keep up with the intuitive thought process of their users. That’s how they will be able to find untapped opportunities and make better decisions. Sign up for our demo, to see first-hand how it can be done.

For more information about MoData offerings click here

The Time For Cultivating Citizen Data Scientists Has Come

Big Data, the big daddy of buzzwords that has been done to death by industry pundits and leading publishers with their understanding of what it means and its impact on the way we do business.

If technology thought leader Gartner is to be believed, Big Data is that fat lady whose size is 3 Vs big:

  1. Volume: The most self-explanatory aspect of the term which suggests the huge and ever increasing quantum of data.
  2. Velocity: The phenomenal speed at which data flows in and out of information systems thanks to high speed telecommunications networks and advancements in chip-level as well as data centre computing.
  3. Variety: The many structured and unstructured forms in which data is generated by sensors, smart IoT devices, enterprise applications as well as the average users who surf the internet and stay connected through it.

Cloud computing services from the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure are instrumental in containing this ever increasing data bulge.

In the absence of proper utilization, Big Data is akin to a huge blob of whale vomit that is waiting to be discovered by those who recognize and understand its value. We have data scientists to help enterprises out for that sort of thing.

The biggest problem with data scientists is that they are hard to come by. All the good ones are. In fact, their skills set is so rare that they have been dubbed as Unicorn Data Scientists. Businesses are willing to pay an upwards of $200,000 a year just to warm a seat up.

So what goes into the making of good data scientists? Two things:

  1. First and foremost, they understand your business like the back of their hand.
  2. Second – They are slick users of Python and Java among other programming languages that work in tandem with big data architecture.

That’s a combination that is as hard to find as two Giant Pandas who are in the mood to mate.

Fortunately, Big Data SaaS applications built by data scientists are around to help businesses pick up the slack. It makes sense to use them because:

  • They require little to no integration with your existing systems
  • They have an easy to use interface
  • All possible business intelligence generation scenarios are pre-configured
  • Anything you find missing can be incorporated immediately

The best thing about SaaS applications is that your team members don’t need to be technically qualified to use them. SaaS products are plug and play in nature that simply require you to have nothing but inquisitiveness. Proficiency with spreadsheets is an added advantage, but not a ‘must-have’.

In light of this it is easy to see how SaaS tools bring about democratization of data. A good SaaS big data tool empowers every user to become a citizen data scientist by giving them the opportunity to effortlessly deep dive into available data without waiting for approvals or a helping hand from the IT department. All that is required are login credentials and a browser of your choice like Chrome or Firefox.

At Mo-Data we have developed one such big data tool that allows businesses to create an army of citizen data scientists. Data Scout is our business analytics tool that empowers you to get more out of your data in the following ways:

  • It combines the power of spreadsheets and popular data manipulation tools. It eliminates the need to go through cumbersome configuration processes, you don’t need to download anything and no coding skills are required.
  • Since Data Scout is hosted on the cloud, it requires no installation and is ready for use as soon as login information lands in your inbox.
  • Manipulating and tinkering with data is facilitated by an easy to use visual interface that requires you to simply use the mouse. You have complete freedom to pick and choose data sets that matter to you.
  • Data Scout is loaded with data security features that ensure that any personally identifiable information (PII) is masked from the moment it is uploaded and stored on cloud encrypted non-transferable storage with SSL certificates.
  • The tool is loaded with intelligent algorithms that automatically detect relationships between data sets that were previously unknown to you.
  • A range of data visualization options are available that can be easily shared in the form of graphic charts which can be embedded in presentation slides.

If Data Scout sounds like the kind of tool your organization needs, then we would like to hear from you.

For more information about MoData offerings click here