InetSoft Webinar: The Benefits of an Effective Analytical Environment

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "How to Implement Business Analytics." The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, Product Manager at InetSoft.

So what are the kinds of benefits that companies can expect to see with an effective analytical environment? Well, first as we talked about on the previous few slides, the best companies see an enhanced ability to make quicker decisions. More of these companies saw that accelerated decision speed as we see in the chart on the left. This then leads to an enhanced ability to satisfy increasingly demanding customers.

Seventy-seven percent of best performing companies saw an improvement or substantial improvement in customer response time. With faster decisions along with faster customer response time comes increased business opportunities. Opportunities drive growth, and in many cases, as well, opportunities for efficiency gains, operational improvements and ultimately increased profitability. The best companies on average saw a 31% year-over-year increase in operating profit compared to a slight decrease for laggards.

So, just to close out here, I want to explain how does a company tailor its approach to analytics and ultimately drive some of the performance improvements we talked about on the last slide. Well the data really here points toward a couple main areas that can help this journey, so to speak. First, it is all about understanding, managing and improving the data environment.

What is this ocean of data look like for your company? What are the critical data sources that feed into your analyses? What are the applications that you are using most? How can you improve that data quality to help build user trust in the data? And what are the ways you can remove the barriers of information transfer and improve the accessibility and speed of access for that data?

Secondly, the business world is filled with BI tools that have the potential to help with this process, but it’s incumbent upon each organization to understand their users and deliver meaningful solutions and apply to the technology judiciously. The research shows that visual appeal really matters as do job role relevant solutions. Companies and users themselves need to understand what that decision window is and look to deliver information within it, and from a mobile perspective try to move beyond simple consumption of insight on a mobile device, and enable that further exploration in creation of insight beyond what's originally presented. And last, but certainly not least here it's all about the team and picking the right crew, so to speak.

Movie buffs might recognize the picture that I have up here as the crew from the Titanic movie which is somewhat whimsical but also relevant here. Analytical projects with the wrong team, the wrong culture, lacking support can turn into costly time consuming endeavors that really bare little fruit. The value of analytics is so closely tied to adoption and frequent usage of the technology.

So companies should work on further developing that culture, looking at various new roles that can help foster this kind of culture and work with senior management to build the ROI case for analytics around the adoption and engagement in analytics leading to substantial opportunities for business growth and efficiency as well.

Now we want to talk about how you bring analytics out to other parts of your organization and help you focus on Big Data and how you go mobile and things like that. I want to take you to place that is really inspiring. I want you to think about what does it mean for an organization to not just stay and keep up with analytics but to actually start to innovate and think about what is possible in your industry on your organization with Big Data.

Read the top 10 reasons for selecting InetSoft as your BI partner.

We believe it is the perfect storm for real time engagement, and what I mean by that is we really need to be thinking about the two things. One is about what is the future of your business. We talked about a lot of best performing organizations and the research behind what made them successful, but ultimately they were able to figure out how to use data in a way that drove innovation.

They became more of a data business versus business that is just a manufacturing business or a healthcare business. And then finally, how do you empower the individuals in your organization or even your consumers as you innovate as you become that data driven business because we all know that in our personal lives we have become data driven and information driven people.