Ever since the first list reports were created in its ERP solution, SAP’s focus has been on helping its users make effective business decisions. Today’s digitized economy makes markets hyper efficient, reduces capital, increases transparency, and drives business at an unprecedented pace. Strategies, plans, and their execution are more deeply intertwined than ever before, business models are agile and susceptible to rapid disruption, data proliferates, and organizations decentralize.
At the same time, software is undergoing a major transformation in the age of digitalization with increased computational capacity and new ways to source more data that fuels machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). These changes have led SAP to completely rethink analytics for the digital age.
Until now, analytics has been used by IT specialists and data analysts to create data visualizations that support the decision-making process. While today’s notion of self-service means that these tools are more widely used by a greater number of roles in the enterprise, in most cases, they still require users to first learn the tools, understand the data models, and manage the content.
Going forward, AI technologies have the potential to make reports of this kind a thing of the past, used for regulatory reports only. Standard decisions will be made by the analytics platform, and every business user will have access to information at any time without having to first learn the tools or data models. They will be able to perform complex analytical tasks with the assistance of the analytics service itself, with algorithms, machine learning, and new natural language processing-based voice interfaces augmenting and enhancing human work.
The aim is to make data—be it structured or unstructured, in the cloud, or on-premise—an accessible asset that enables all users to make confident decisions.
The key to this lies in the concept of convergence—at the level of the analytics tools, the semantics for data, the roles of the people who use it, and how it is accessed. It’s about the key words “one simple cloud” and delivering business intelligence (BI), planning, and predictive in one cloud platform with one common and simple user experience.
We’ve created a series of blogs to look at what this means in detail and the role a converged analytics platform plays in delivering the intelligent enterprise. Here in part one, we will explore the new possibilities that have opened up as a result of converged analytics domains.
