“Experience”, “user experience”, “search experience”, “mobile experience”, “web experience”...
This highly popular family of words now has a (not so) new “member”: “analytics experience”.
Or, if you prefer a more suggestive name for it: “tailored analytics experience”!
It can only mean that, as a business owner, you shouldn't limit yourself to providing just your users with the best experiences, but your employees, too.
And here we're talking about crafting visually-appealing, optimized, nonetheless interactive (and don't forget customizable) self-service analytics experiences for your agile team!
Giving their data-handling experiences the due consideration you're, in fact, ensuring your business's relevance in your competitive niche.
Basically, as you streamline their entire work-flow, by embedding analytics in the apps (as opposed to standalone business intelligence tools) they use at work, as you guarantee them seamless analytics experiences, you actually empower your team to strategically turn all the accessed data into “fuel” for your company's success.
And all that in a timely manner!
Let's see, in detail, how precisely incorporating analytics in your team's workflow will impact your business:
1. It Enables Your Team to Make Accurate Predictions
Stop wasting time, stop wasting money!
Here's a “common” work scenario to ponder over: "Let's say you still rely on a standalone BI tool (or on several BI tools) in your company, that you import your software-driven data into this tool; what you're getting, in fact, what you'll be examining later on, is nothing but “past tense” data.
And where do you add that you're practically losing valuable time waiting for this “historical information” to get imported before you start analyzing it, before you draw your own pertinent reports and way before you even decide to take action.
Can you really afford to lose all this time and energy?
Instead, by embedding analytics in your company's software you, and your team, will have real-time valuable data right at your fingertips, anywhere, any time!
2. It Puts Data In The Context of Your Team's Workflow
Embedded analytics means “contextualized analytics”.
And that's a big booster for your employees' workflow!
Put self-service analytics at your teams' disposal and they'll practically gain access to the particular information they need for carrying out the tasks in their departments. That, instead of “overloading” them with unnecessary data for their specific roles and skills.
Moreover (and this is another huge benefit): with this data available all the time, anywhere, not only that you stir their curiosity and encourage them to “exploit” the available data during their daily activities: you also help them gain their autonomy.
Instead of constantly calling the IT department, now they get to find find the answers to their questions themselves.
Instead of putting into practice risky tactics, they can now do the proper research first, themselves.
Using the analytics delivered to them by the apps they're using, they can turn their hypothesis and dilemmas into data-driven decisions.
3. It Streamlines and Tailors Reporting Within Your Team/s
Now this is another particularity of any agile team: its members' habit to share the collected information, their reports, to their co-workers. Spreading key data, cooperation and teamwork are some of “agile teams''” basic particularities.
But how does embedded analytics set itself apart form third party software from this standpoint alone?
It enables your employees to send out “tailored” reports!
So each department will get its own report and data: the sales one its own dedicated chart, the web design and the IT departments their own share of data relevant for their specific tasks and so on.
Get it? Relying on telemetry, embedded analytics points out what charts and data to be sent out to specific teams/people from your company.
So you won't be wasting anyone's time; so you won't be wasting company money.
Increasing efficiency is the major goal you'll reach using embedded analytics!
4. It Turns The Analytics Experience Into Visual Storytelling
“Storytelling”! Here is another powerful word, as powerful as “experience”.
So, why shouldn't you provide your employees, to, with visual storytelling? And not just your customers?
Embedded, self-service analytics creates the perfect context for such interactive, visually-appealing experiences for your employees.
And were do you add that they're ideally customizable, as well?
Your team can:
- drill down
- click through
- put together reports based on how they want the needed data to be delivered to them (and not on how a third-party software vendor would decide to display it to them)
5. It Fuses Together Data Coming From Various Sources
The heading says it all: you'd be saving loads of valuable time (that you'd be spending on taking action instead) by installing embedded analytics on your company devices.
Take this time and energy-consuming scenario into account:
“You need to run a mixed report, so your team of Toronto developers sets out on an never-ending “marathon”. They start collecting data from the cloud, the apps and other “storage” devices, then they draft multiple reports, then they examine all the data, take out the relevant one, keep the key one and it's only then they start to actually put together the mixed report that you need to gain insight and take action.”
Why should you “exploit” your team that way, especially since it's so time-inefficient?
Especially when you can simply embed analytics, which will pull in data from multiple sources, run reports and deliver you the all-in-one chart?
In real time!
Encourage Your Team To Embrace The Analytics Culture
Maybe we should have started our post with this part instead.
Why? Because you will never benefit from the above-mentioned advantages that embedded-analytics comes with unless you first “stir” an appetite for data in our employees.
Unless you don't promote data-driven decision making first.
An how do manage to build this whole analytics mindset?
Let us give you 3 scenarios you could use in your data-centered "demos":
- you show your co-workers how precisely a server error could impact your online store
- you use conclusive data for influencing the way they'll spend the company's money in various work-related situations
- you use real-time data for setting targets to be reached within certain time frames
How about you? Have your efforts for promoting an analytics culture within your team paid off? Have you already streamlined your entire work-flow with embedded analytics?
If not, what stops you? We're curious to hear your thoughts about this topic!
