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Our customers want data. They’ve been asking us for three key things:

  1. Make it easy for front line staff to make faster more accurate decisions.

  2. Get answers and share findings anywhere on a phone, watch or desktop.

  3. Securely deliver any data, from any source instantly - and manage it simply.

We heard from our customers that if they could only liberate insight from the data warehouse and encourage their people to have conversations empowered by data, they could do more business, and better business.  Lets follow the example illustrated by the infographic below, which conveys a real conversation with a government agency.  

The BI environment represented here is traditional data warehouse storage, with insights surfaced via a new visualisation based dashboard. Every day, call centre managers and operations teams receive questions on performance from executives.  This is a pretty typical scenario, and all is well when performance meets the pre-defined key metrics.  

Things tend to break down with the appearance of performance-related events that are out of the ordinary, such scenarios include: call times increasing, response speeds dropping below SLA, or call volumes in certain divisions rising higher than average.

The key to resolving these is to answer that all important question - WHY? (And, to do it quickly)

For example:

  • Why are some teams performing better?  

  • Why are other services falling below agreed service level?

Business managers and employees alike need answers to make changes - nothing will improve without them.  Not in a day’s time, after someone has found the time to built out a new dashboard.  Beside, you could never preempt every question, nor develop a dashboard for all permutations.  The time and cost of resources to value ratio is too high to even consider doing this.

But, what if you were able to approach analytics in a whole new way? What if managers - and employees, by the way - had power to not only view data in dashboards, but drill into breakdowns and explore various potential scenarios based on what was currently happening in the organisation. This kind of empowerment would mean the decisions typically made during the course of business would always be fast, entirely appropriate, and able to react to changing conditions.

Consider also that frontline employees do not always have the luxury of being desk bound. Imagine empowering those people with real time alerts to a watch, enabling them to quickly glean insights into any issue at a glance.  When dashboards are mobile friendly we get to move beyond the admin stage straight to the fast exploration of the data required to answer questions in unseen circumstances. Remember, there are no actual analysts involved here - it’s bypassing the crunch and still getting the numbers!

Taking a snapshot of an insight to then forward to someone who has the ability to affect data-driven change also becomes entirely conceivable during the normal course of daily business.  So when that call inevitably comes to you as a call centre manager for example, you are up to speed and ready to discuss the solution already in play - not scrambling for answers.

It’s important to mention here that IT must ensure the appropriate governance is in place.  Things like secure delivery and restricted access are non-negotiable - it goes without saying.  However, with the Analytics Cloud IT gets to empower the business with secure insights but avoid the mindless minutia brought by endless streams of questions and SQL ping pong. And, on the flip side the business is no longer frustrated by lack of autonomy and protracted turnaround times for data requests. Win/win!  

Does this sounds like a scenario you’d like to explore within your business? Visit our new analytics playground and try it for yourself.