Why Self-Service Analytics Might See Bigger Adoption Amid Crisis
The pandemic outbreak has made several businesses struggle with their continuity as well as keeping up their relevance during this uncertain time. And therefore, enterprises are now relying on analytics to make informed decisions during the time of crisis. By analysing the data, enterprises can understand the crisis and its impact on their businesses. This assists them in creating necessary strategies to enhance the efficiency of their employees. However, with the increasing volume of data, making these crucial decisions of understanding the crisis and the customer requirements demand smart analytics for businesses. It is essential for businesses to have self-service analytics across their operational layers in order to get the most out of their data and create beneficial insights from it. As compared to traditional analytics, self-service analytics enhances the whole process of data-driven decision making. It also provides access to data and information anytime and anywhere to every business department. Business intelligence and analytical tools usually depend on the size of the organisation, however, “self-service analytics is a significant topic for all companies seeking to better leverage vast information resources and a scarcity of expertise to drive improved group-based decision making in a governed fashion,” said Jim Ericson, research director at Dresner Advisory Services to the media. Despite numerous advantages, self-service analytics has never played a huge part in businesses. However, social distancing has indeed created the requirement for self-service analytics. In a recent survey done by Analytic India Magazine, it has been revealed that the highest proportion of respondents — 29%, are working on projects related to predictive analytics with 22% of respondents working on descriptive analytics related projects during this lockdown. Such numbers show that companies are actively working on self-service analytics projects to make better-informed decisions amid this crisis. Here are a few ways self-service analytics can help businesses enhance their productivity. Collated Necessary Data At One Place With traditional analytics, IT teams spend the majority of their time querying data and creating reports for business leaders to make informed decisions, which used to create delays for enterprises. However, self-service analytics can offer access to data to all the departments of organisations for them to make necessary decisions for the business. Majority of organisations still work on scattered data, where data is receding at different places, which could create inconsistency and loopholes in the record. Self-service analytics will allow organisations to integrate all their data at one place for leaders to have a better view of their businesses, employees, and customers amid this crisis. Such a capability is indeed necessary when businesses have opted remote working. For this, many companies also opt for cloud-based analytical solutions where it becomes easy for analysts to extract, transform, visualise, and analyse the data. Such smart tools will make an organisation less dependent on their technical team and analysts for data analysis and reporting during this COVID pandemic, thus will empower employees by providing refined access to data for increased productivity. Focusing Analyst’s Capabilities For Complex Data Science With people working remotely, traditional analytics forces the involvement of analysts to read the data and help business leaders make informed decisions, which takes up a considerable amount of their time. And, therefore, it gets difficult for the data scientists to focus on core analytical work, which is much more critical for your business. Whereas, self-service analytics empowers employees with data and therefore eliminates the constant requirement of analysts during this crisis while the whole workforce is working remotely. With this, analysts can focus on solving critical business problems. Considering we are living in the age of constant data generation, analysing a huge amount of data can be a difficult task for technical people of the organisations, and therefore gets challenging for business leaders to get the benefits of analytics. Self-Service analytics provide access to data and reporting to all remote working employees of the organisation for them to make informed decisions despite working separately. This will allow data scientists to focus their time and efforts on the long term and high-value projects, as well as creating strategies to solve complex issues and enhance customer experience, which is necessary for organisations to thrive in this competitive landscape. A sound self-service analytical system is indeed necessary for businesses to stay relevant during this crisis. It should be designed to collect, integrate, as well as analyse data across all departments for business leaders to make informed and beneficial decisions. Narrowing Skills Gap & Increase Employee Productivity The skills gap is indeed a concern in the COIVD world but will definitely remain an issue post the pandemic. With business employees working remotely, it becomes difficult to get access of your technical team at the time of their need, which indeed creates the requirement of a system that can be easily operated and understood by not-so-technical leaders and employees of the organisation. Self-service analytics has a smooth deployment process for organisations, which doesn’t require assistance from your technical team; neither from your analysts. Considering the businesses would also be not required any other assistance, it would also cut related costs related to hardware and infrastructure. By utilising self-service analytics, business leaders, as well as employees, can analyse required data and create specific reports to address business challenges without the help of any extra resources, and therefore becomes self-sufficient at this time of crisis. In turn, it also decreases the skills gap, as all employees will now be able to understand the importance of data. Alongside, self-service analytical tools enable collaboration between your employees and your technical team of analysts, which indeed can provide better productivity for businesses amid this crisis. Collaboration allows the teams to have a better understanding of the data, which will ensure better accuracy while making decisions. Comprehensive self-service analytics also provide them real-time updates on their employees, customers, and the overall business. A lot of small enterprises are also deploying self-service analytics who are willing to leverage the benefits of analytics in their organisation during this pandemic. Businesses that have implemented self-service analytics at the core of their organisations can stand out from their competition, reduce cost, and can increase profits by making informed decisions. Robust Security For Amid Remote Workers Data security becomes extremely important for organisations amid this crisis as the data will be in the hands of remote workers who will be accessing sensitive critical data from unsecured networks. Self-service analytics tools come with a robust security framework, which ensures that employees and business leaders have to go through levels of encryption to have access to the required data. These smart-systems help organisations to create necessary security standards to protect business information, which isn’t possible with traditional analytics. It also urges businesses to make data understandable by their remote workers, which creates a smoother flow of data, and the usage is also governed with self-service analytics. In order to run a business effectively during this uncertain time, it is imperative for business leaders to focus on creating effective business strategies rather than worrying about data and its security, which can reduce productivity. Having self-service analytics will ensure proper data monitoring and will also help the IT team to create the necessary security framework of the organisation. Self-service analytical tools offer customisable security tools for each of your employees, which not only controls the data access but also prevents third-party organisations from accessing sensitive financial information of the company. Such tools automate business processes and allow every employee of the organisation to explore data and share visualisations while maintaining cybersecurity protocols to protect critical business information.
The pandemic outbreak has made several businesses struggle with their continuity as well as keeping up their relevance during this uncertain time. And therefore, enterprises are now relying on analytics to make informed decisions during the time of crisis. By analysing the data, enterprises can understand the crisis and its impact on their businesses. This […]
Here are a few ways self-service analytics can help businesses enhance their productivity.
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["business intelligence", "data science", "Go", "AI", "R", "RAG", "ViT", "analytics", "GAN", "predictive analytics"]
["AI", "data science", "analytics", "RAG", "predictive analytics", "R", "Go", "GAN", "ViT", "business intelligence"]
Sejuti currently works as Associate Editor at Analytics India Magazine (AIM). Reach out at sejuti.das@analyticsindiamag.com