This is part 1 of a series on analytics which will appear each Wednesday on the TIBCO blog.
Whether you’re a data scientist or a business manager, it’s essential to pose the right questions to get the right big data answers.
When you need to solve a specific business problem (e.g., applying claims, market, and customer data to determine whether a claim is fraudulent), start by identifying business objectives, then align those goals against the correct data sets.
Demand More From Your Data
Posing the right question starts with pinpointing what the organization is aiming to accomplish. Are you trying to increase revenue among existing customers? Boost customer loyalty? Identify the reasons behind customer churn?
By isolating the problem, businesses use analytics to create the best questions and determine the correct data sets to apply them against.
From there, and to ensure that you’re actually gathering the right data sets and using them correctly, it’s important to ask challenging questions about the sources of the data and how you intend to use it: Where did the data come from? Is it timely enough for meeting our business requirements? Is it accurate? Should we overlay this with other data to illustrate a pattern or gain a more multidimensional view of operational or business trends? Are there weaknesses or shortcomings with the data available that can skew the results?
Decision-makers need answers to these questions in real time. A cloud-based analytics platform can enable individual users to get the answers to their pressing business and operational questions quickly. This avoids a lengthy IT build, which often results in a data warehouse or data mart loading the data, then generating reports.
Analytics Available Whenever You Need Them
Intuitive, web-based analytics tools make it easy for business leaders, divisional managers, and key stakeholders to drill down on data without the need for extra programming.
Meanwhile, a sophisticated analytics platform that’s designed to meet the needs of various classes of business users allows for decision-makers to pose more complex questions right out of the box, without the need for IT to intervene.
Business is moving at the speed of light. In order to succeed in this fast-paced and ever-changing environment, enterprise leaders require highly configurable and functional analytics tools they can use themselves to analyze and digest dynamic business and market information in real time.
This includes a marketing analyst who’s looking to identify the amount of revenue generated by an inbound marketing campaign, or a product manager who wants to compare the profitability of different product lines to identify which merchandise is and isn’t performing well.
Business leaders don’t have the time or the patience to wait for IT to pose the right questions and generate reports—reports that may well be obsolete by the time they reach key decision-makers. They need analytics tools that are instinctive and allow them to ask the right questions and collect insights immediately.
To learn more about sophisticated analytics, take advantage of a free 30-day evaluation of Spotfire.
