Data is everywhere:
Excel spreadsheets, on-premise applications, industry-specific reporting tools, data warehouses, cloud base applications, social media etc.
The task for business analysts is to combine this data together and create a wealth of business insights. Alteryx defines the data analytics culture as a mix of data preparation and data blending enabling their peers to discover, analyze, model and deploy their insights to the business community.
The analytic continuum (descriptive analysis, dashboarding, spatial, predictive, prescriptive, cognitive and so on…) is defined, as this roadmap where reaching a milestone is only an additional step in the elusive promise land of Business Intelligence nirvana.
At the recent Alteryx conference, thousands of enthusiastic business analysts were learning how to become a Data Hero, learning how to use the true power of the platform to create powerful data insights. The excitement was palpable and reminded me of the enthusiasm felt a few years ago at a similar conference of one of the major BI vendor.
How do we go from Data Hero to Business Hero?
Business analysts are telling us the same story over and over again…
“We created these powerful insights for our BI platform(s) but nobody is using them”
As a matter fact, the content being used is less than 10% of your target audience.
Why? There are 3 main problems with BI and analytics today:
- There are still too many places for your users to find the data they need.
- When they locate it, they have to seek and search for the data they want.
- Finally, when they find it, they get overwhelmed with too much data.
Since business users stopped looking for the data they need, the business analyst team goes to the next step in the analytic continuum to lure their users again and the cycle repeats itself.
To become a BUSINESS HERO, you must enable your business users by:
- Providing a single point of access for all the information available to them,
- Distributing the information to them in a personalized way,
- Highlighting clearly where they should focus their attention.
When companies adopt this approach, user engagement increases dramatically since business users are finally getting the insights they were initially looking for a long time ago when they started their BI journey.
