Collective Analytics
Information is one of the most valuable assets of an organization. It can be used to optimize business processes and enables innovation and the discovery and capture of new market opportunities.
But information doesn’t come from nowhere. It all starts with administrating data. Data has no value on itself: the real value comes from combining data, viewing data in context, and discovering structure and correlations within the data; in short: analytics.
More and more, analytics becomes part of our daily jobs. It doesn’t only form the underpinnings of strategic decisions. In fact, each decision, whether it has strategic impact or it is of operational nature, should be based on specific insights. This means that the need for a more dynamic form of analytics arises.
Traditional solutions for analytics, or business intelligence, are the domain of the IT department. Unfortunately, these solutions reach only a small part of the organization’s people. Most users are on their own for the insights they need, and often they use Microsoft Excel to get them. This is a situation that is still common in almost any organization, and is typically regarded as detrimental. But the solution typically consist of attempts to eliminate the use of Excel by developing even more centrally-managed, standardized reports and dashboards.
Collective Analytics acknowledges the value that arises when a broad group of people forms insights from data and starts sharing these insights. It envisions synergy between the central IT or BI department and professionals working in other business disciplines. We therefore distinguish two approached that complement en reinforce each other: Enterprise BI and End-user BI.
Enterprise BI is the field of play of the IT department or the BI competence center. It focuses on data quality, a managed process for development and operations, and standard reports. End-user BI focuses on quickly establishing insights that are tailored to specific situations and processes. It is developed by people who are part of the business processes, like a business analyst, a controller, or a marketeer.
The vision of Collective Analytics becomes viable through modern analytics platforms, and specifically by Microsoft’s platform with Power BI. With Collective Analytics, we not only acknowledge the value of the new analytics tools when it comes to reporting quality and ease of use. We also leverage the specific strengths of modern end-user tools to accelerate and improve analytics projects. To do this, we translated our experience into a project approach, called Agile Analytics.
Do you want your organization to benefit from Collective Analytics? Contact us for an introductory meeting, an awareness workshop, or a pilot project.