Companies and enterprises are facing a daily grind, while they are also required to see to it that their customers are happy & satisfied, operations is efficient and employees are satisfied; and all this makes running the business – a real challenge. “Audience is the new business model”, and if any organization is struggling miserably to communicate with customers or their audience, there certainly is a negative impact of it across the business plan,…

It has been a practice followed religiously by companies and organizations to analyze how they have performed over a period of time. It is mandatory for them to do so; just that some do it to survive and some do it to thrive in concurrent…

If you have BI Tools and you have business users who are expected to use these BI tools, you may be frustrated! Are your users struggling to understand a complex system, or are they restricted by dashboards created by IT to satisfy their needs? Is your data integration incomplete or inaccurate. Maybe you think you need business intelligence solution training for…

When considering a BI solution, focus on a human-centric approach to software design. The business is comprised of people (not machines) and software solutions must satisfy user needs, rather than focusing on a particular platform, framework or technology. This human-centric approach is critical to creating any kind of software or interface, but especially so when…

Do self-serve BI tools support data governance, integral data security and organizational IT standards and policies? In some cases, the answer is 'no'. But, that shouldn't stop you from looking at self-serve BI tools. The question isn't whether the integrity of data governance can be preserved when using self-serve BI tools. The question is really, 'which vendor…

For some, simply skimming over material with words like ‘systems analysis’ or ‘business statistical data’ causes eyes to glaze over as interest and attention vaporize into thin air like a wisp of smoke. But these business buzzwords are not so nebulous in their foundations. Analytical data and use of Big…

Data environments are growing exponentially. IDC reports that compound annual growth in data through 2020 will be almost 50% per year. Not only is there more data, but there are more data sources. According to Ventana Research, 70% of organizations need to integrate more than 6 disparate data sources. At the same time, the value of unlocking that data and using it to make business decisions is also increasing. For the business user, understanding this complex data and unlocking its potential…

There are numerous reasons why a software implementation might fail and the list is too long to cover in this article. But, when it comes to Business Intelligence Software, there are some common reasons for failure.

Like many other businesses, your enterprise may have entered into the business intelligence (BI) domain with the belief that, as soon as…

When business intelligence vendors talk about democratizing data discovery, they can have very different interpretations about 'democracy'. If a business intends to provide self-serve BI tools to its employees for daily use and data discovery, it must provide true data democratization. The business user cannot be limited to viewing static dashboards developed by dashboard developers with only the most basic drill down and filtering capabilities. Business users must be empowered by true data…

There is lot of noise about Visualization of data in BI space these days. Simple charts, complex charts (few of them can not be digested by many business users :) ), tons of properties and configurations and much more....

Yes, a great work has been done in these area by most of the vendors in the BI marketplace today, and all decision makers are enthusiastic…

In 2012, Harvard Business Review cited data scientist as the sexiest job of the 21st century. Just two months ago LinkedIn shared the “25 Hottest Skills that Got People Hired in 2014” – guess what type of workers possessed these skills? This attention has been followed with a slew of articles telling budding analysts the skills they’ll need to get to the top of the data scientist food…

Business intelligence solutions have come a long way in the past five years with continued innovation and transformation from traditional BI to data visualization and data discovery. With the advent of improved BI tools and accessibility, many businesses are using precious IT budgets to add self-serve business intelligence to their solution infrastructure and put the power of self-serve BI tools into the hands of their employees and business users.

Vendors like …

      

"Analytics is a journey and not a destination!! It takes considerable effort to frame that journey and execute it with a sense of purpose. You will encounter stumbling blocks that may threaten your initiative but you need to find a way out and keep marching ahead."

We did an analytics exercise for a US client recently in education domain that had all the flavors of roadblocks…

As a decision analyst, it is delightful to see all the excitement about the ever-increasing amounts of data available. But, when I see much of what data scientists are doing to find interesting patterns (descriptive analytics is just looking in the rear view mirros) and forecasting (predictive analytics, ideally our GPS), I see little attention paid to the real business decisions that might be informed by these insights (the decision analytics, helping our clients steer a better…

A Tool That Grants Independence to Business Users

We all know the constant struggle between IT and business users when it comes to BI software: Business users want to access data in order to make fast decisions independently, without having to use IT as a middle man every time a new requirement arises, query is run, or data is added. Yet, IT is overwhelmed by constantly changing requests and requirements, and struggle to deliver data in an actionable time-frame. The…

If I told you all of our modern activities–posts to social media sites, transaction records, online activities, digital pictures and videos, and mobile GPS signals to name a few– leave a trail of data behind that is estimated to produce about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, would you have a real feel for how much data that is? Even if I defined that number more clearly as 1 followed by 18 zeros, many tech veterans and savvy business leaders still have trouble digesting the scope of…

Sharing a lecture introducing business analytics to agroup of MBA and MIS students at Erasmus Rotterdam School of Management:

Summary:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmG7FJhms2Q

Part 1 of 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFYYDrEV4wI

Part 2 of 4: …

DISCOVER.DECIDE.DO. - The Future of Business Intelligence, Big Data & Analytics - will be the largest, most impactful virtual event of the year to help you turn data into action.…

For full post:  http://sctr7.com/2013/09/08/analytics-and-belief-the-struggle-for-truth/

Increasingly sophisticated analytics tools and methods are available to derive business insight from data.  However, as a discipline which drives insight from data, the crucial ‘last step’ in the analytics process is about organizational decision making.  A sophisticated, intensive analysis may all be…