Business Analytics Tools are not Pokemon – you don’t have to “catch ’em all”!

Pokemon logo over Pokemon card collection

In early June, I attended the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Mumbai, India. I attended the summit as a representative of one of Minerra’s key technology partners, Yellowfin. With their Indian partner Aptus Data Labs, we engaged over 100 attendees with some great conversations about business intelligence, business analytics tools and the challenges of both.

In our conversations, one theme quickly emerged. Many people visiting the Yellowfin booth had a similar conundrum: they had many different analytics tools (usually three or more) in their organisation and wanted to consolidate down to just one tool.

Over the two days, the number of people coming up to us with this issue was so numerous that we began calling it the “Pokemon Problem” – it appeared that many organisations treat analytics tools like Pokemon and feel that they have to “catch ‘em all”!

Why so many analytics tools?

The reasons why organisations “suddenly” had so many different analytics tools varied but over the course of the summit, some similar explanations emerged:

  • Different tools were acquired as a result of mergers and acquisitions but nothing had been done to standardise one analytics tool across the merged organisation.
  • Organisations had a loose or non-existent policy about the purchase of analytics tools within different departments, so each department purchased the tool they wanted despite different tools already existing within the organisation.
    • This is also a consequence of poorly governed self-service business intelligence.
  • Organisations had an existing analytics tool, but the existing tool did not have the required functionality. As a consequence of this, it decided to buy another analytics tool and use both tools in parallel rather than creating a plan to migrate from the old system to the new.
  • One organisation even said they purchased a new analytics tool because a newly employed data scientist did not like the existing analytics tools.

Why is this a problem?

The problems cause by collecting many different analytics tools were:

  • Confusion and inefficiencies among consumers of analytics content. There was a huge burden on staff to remember how to use many different tools to access the information they need to monitor performance and make decisions. This also led many users to use the analytics tools just to download raw data so they could later analyse the data using Excel – the one tool they know well. This also increased the risks associated with ungoverned analytics content being used in the organisation.
  • Low productivity for analytics developers, either because additional developers are needed to ensure that the organisation has expert skills for all the analytics tools, or the existing developers have to know all tools, which leads to them having only a moderate level of skill with all tools rather than being expert in one tool.
  • Increased licence and maintenance costs for the organisation because they have small licence holdings with many software vendors rather a large licence holding with one vendor, which may lead to overall lower licence costs.
  • Increased operational costs because IT departments have to provide and maintain multiple sets of infrastructure for each analytics tool, particularly if the tool requires a server to distribute the content.

In my next post on this topic, I will provide the responses we gave to attendees – how you can solve the issue, and where you can start.

Steve Remington – Principal Consultant and Founder, Minerra

Is your organisation using multiple analytics tools? Are your employees making the most of these tools? Are some of these tools perhaps redundant, or have too many overlapping features? Minerra can help assess your needs and weight them against what you have to provide you with a plan to streamline your analytics tools. Contact us for a casual chat to see how we can help.

Image Credit: Jarek Tuszyński via Wikimedia Commons

Analytics: Are you ready to take the leap?

Minerra Article Analytics Ready To Take The Leap Hero Image

Analytics, big data, business intelligence.

These buzzwords entered conversations in organisations a few years ago now, but not many people know what they mean.

As information technology has pervaded every department and every business process, companies have generated a tremendous amount of data. From small businesses to international conglomerates, every organisation generates data that, until fairly recently, has been simply accumulated and stored. And until you can access, interpret and understand this data, your organisation is missing out on the opportunity to use this information to augment and make informed business decisions.

Analytics is a vital tool to support the decision-making process. This business.com article provides a few succinct examples of how businesses of any size can benefit from analytics:

  • It’s much easier to make informed decisions.
  • It’s a structured way for growing revenue.
  • It increases the competitive advantage over other players in the industry, including larger businesses.
  • It improves the productivity of their business operations.
  • It enhances the quality of their customer service.

So why wouldn’t you leverage your data to gain these benefits? There are many perceived barriers companies face when thinking about approaching analytics:

  • I don’t think my company wants to spend money on this yet.
  • We don’t have the budget for this.
  • I don’t know where my data is.
  • I don’t know how to get to my data.
  • I don’t even know what is being stored.
  • I wouldn’t know the first thing about sorting out the data.
  • I cannot interpret this data.
  • I cannot communicate this effectively to my manager/head of department/CEO.

With the right tools and the right approach, companies can easily overcome these barriers so they can leverage their data for competitive advantage.

We’ve written a short guide to help you think about whether your organisation is ready to take the leap. Click on the button below to fill in a quick form and get the guide delivered to your inbox.

Download our guide

If you think your organisation is ready to have a conversation about analytics, give us a call. We’d be happy to have a no-obligation consultation with you to see where your organisation stands, and how we can help.