3 Ways Shadow Analytics May Be Working Against You
Are you tapping into all of your data‘s potential? According to a comprehensive report from McKins
Analytics is popping up in more functional areas of businesses, outside of IT’s control. Like BYOB, the trend is inevitable. How will your organization manage it?
Businesses are under pressure to compete more effectively, operate more efficiently, and provide users with better customer experiences. To do that, they need to utilize data in smarter ways than they have in the past, faster.
Business units, however, aren’t necessarily relying on IT to deliver the analytics they need because they have seen that IT may not have the budget or the agility required to act quickly enough. As a result, lines of business and departments are making their own investments in analytics. However, the investments aren’t always in their best interest over the long-term, nor are those investments necessarily in the best interest of the enterprise.
How companies handle shadow analytics and how easy it is to deal with depends on the culture of the company, according to Matthew Taylor, managing director, Accenture Strategy.
“If you’ve got a highly centralized IT environment where IT has had full control for many years and the organization is highly regulated, they’re struggling more with shadow IT than more distributed organizations,” he said.
New Silos Are Being Created
Companies have been grappling with data trapped in silos for years. Information is stored in all kinds of applications and the goal has been to liberate at least some of that information. Meanwhile, analytics is spreading out across organizations, but in pockets. Different users and different functions require different tools and, as a result, more analytics silos are being created.
“The people who want to use data will use any piece of software to get what they need,” said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at business intelligence (BI) and analytics solution provider Tableau. “It starts with a frustrated individual who knows that analytics can help her do a better job.”
Individual users and groups tend to have a fairly solid idea of what they want to accomplish, but they don’t always approach solution acquisition from that standpoint.
