Research reveals that companies with strategies for a pervasive analytics culture generate better-than-average business returns. According to a 2014 study of 1,500 executives conducted by Boston Consulting Group, data-driven organizations that leverage analytics generate 12% higher revenues than their counterparts.
Yet, without strong adoption of an analytics solution, becoming a data driven enterprise is little more than a pipe dream. Today, use of analytics technologies has expanded to day-to-day business users, so embedding analytics into an organizations working culture can become a reality. Sales personnel, marketers, engineers, business unit managers, and more must leverage natural, analytic workflows and data discovery to support daily decision making. Doing so drives higher organizational productivity, faster decision-making, and faster time-to-market.
So how does one facilitate strong, corporate-wide adoption of analytics?
Self-Service Analytics: Implement self-service analytics that empowers users of all skill levels to access and analyze data that is relevant to them and their everyday decision-making when and where they want. Companies should not have to compromise security or data governance when implementing a self-service analytics platform—they can have both.
Ease-of-use: Highly interactive, drag and drop features that are intuitive and fun can enable and inspire front-line employees to quickly explore data, find insights, and make data-driven decisions.
Automated Guidance: Even with today’s ease-of-use features, analytics can be intimidating to non-experts. Software with built-in, automated guidance gives business users a jumpstart into their analysis and makes analytics more approachable.
Expert Guidance: Data experts can easily share their analytic expertise with business users by building analytic applications. Analytic applications provide the step-by-step guidance that leads decision makers to insightful decisions, extends the value and impact of business analysts and data scientists, and ensures that standard processes for data use and analysis are being used throughout the company.
Embedded Knowledge: Embedding interactive graphs or reports into core business applications is another way to inject the right information directly into the business workflow. This gives knowledge workers the right information they need at the point of decision.
With self-service access, easy-to-use analytics, automated and expert guidance, and embedded knowledge, analytics adoption will rise and become a natural part of the corporate culture and workflow. When each knowledge worker has access to the right information, at the right time, in the right format, data-driven decisions will become routinely ingrained in daily work and will drive higher organizational productivity, faster decision-making, and time-to-market.
