Struggling to find good data for analytics? Here’s a practical framework for centralising BI and analytics inside the enterprise

Data self-service and data democratisation are two of the biggest trends in 2020. Enterprises want to enable their business users outside of IT to use data and insights to inform decision-making and rely less on guesswork. As we’ve heard many times, the amount of data is growing exponentially and so is the number of data silos per organisation. A recent MarketPulse survey by IDG found that only 23 per cent of respondents have completely centralised their BI and analytics teams. These businesses are missing out on finding insights that could solve business challenges inside marketing, finance, sales, and other departments.

Almost nine out of ten organisations with siloed or partially integrated teams plan to centralise the management of BI and analytics. By fully leveraging the cloud, they will be able to simplify and scale data management, and use their increasing data volumes to find actionable insights and better understand their business.

Ensuring that data is centralised and accessible in your business is a great first step in becoming a data-driven enterprise. Once you make data available to your employees, it opens up new avenues of opportunities for your business. These include:

– Major improvements for existing processes – Once access to new datasets is shared throughout your organisation, data-inclined employees can use this new information to test and challenge the existing or outdated ways of doing business. This can balance the prioritisation of projects for your company’s needs, help create more efficient day-to-day business operations, or allow you to leverage customer data to create new policy or pricing.

– Application of advanced analytics technology – Using data ingestion tools to load and centralise data, you can perform big data discovery; behavioural analytics; self-service data preparation; graph analytics; or web analytics, based on the needs of your business and advanced use cases like augmented analytics for data preparation, data discovery, and data science.

– Exceptional customer experiences – Sharing dashboards of centralised data with  business users can help improve your organisation’s customer experience. When those insights are made accessible to marketing, customer success, and finance, you can easily detect early warning signs that could impact revenue and determine new ways to help customers and create new products based on customer insights.

The first step in centralising BI and analytics is moving to the cloud, if you haven’t done so already. One of the biggest reasons for migrating data to cloud platforms is a faster time to value for implementing analytics projects. This is critical because cloud-based BI and analytics could help address more than a dozen business problems.