The pandemic outbreak has made several businesses struggle with their continuity as well as keeping up their relevance during this uncertain time. And therefore, enterprises are now relying on analytics to make informed decisions during the time of crisis. By analysing the data, enterprises can understand the crisis and its impact on their businesses. This assists them in creating necessary strategies to enhance the efficiency of their employees. 

However, with the increasing volume of data, making these crucial decisions of understanding the crisis and the customer requirements demand smart analytics for businesses. It is essential for businesses to have self-service analytics across their operational layers in order to get the most out of their data and create beneficial insights from it. As compared to traditional analytics, self-service analytics enhances the whole process of data-driven decision making. It also provides access to data and information anytime and anywhere to every business department.

Business intelligence and analytical tools usually depend on the size of the organisation, however, “self-service analytics is a significant topic for all companies seeking to better leverage vast information resources and a scarcity of expertise to drive improved group-based decision making in a governed fashion,” said Jim Ericson, research director at Dresner Advisory Services to the media.

Despite numerous advantages, self-service analytics has never played a huge part in businesses. However, social distancing has indeed created a necessity for democratising the data for self-service analytics. In a recent survey done by Analytic India Magazine, it has been revealed that the highest proportion of respondents — 29%, are working on projects related to predictive analytics with 22% of respondents working on descriptive analytics related projects during this lockdown. Such numbers show that companies are actively working on self-service analytics projects to make better-informed decisions amid this crisis. Here are a few ways self-service analytics can help businesses enhance their productivity.

Collated Necessary Data At One Place

With traditional analytics, IT teams spend the majority of their time querying data and creating reports for business leaders to make informed decisions, which used to create delays for enterprises. However, self-service analytics can offer access to data to all the departments of organisations for them to make necessary decisions for the business. 

Majority of organisations still work on scattered data, where data is receding at different places, which could create inconsistency and loopholes in the record. Self-service analytics will allow organisations to integrate all their data at one place for leaders to have a better view of their businesses, employees, and customers amid this crisis. Such a capability is indeed necessary when businesses have opted remote working. For this, many companies also opt for cloud-based analytical solutions where it becomes easy for analysts to extract, transform, visualise, and analyse the data. Such smart tools will make an organisation less dependent on their technical team and analysts for data analysis and reporting during this COVID pandemic, thus will empower employees by providing refined access to data for increased productivity.

Focusing Analyst’s Capabilities For Complex Data Science

Traditional analytics forces the involvement of analysts and the IT team of your organisation to help business leaders make informed decisions, which takes up a considerable amount of their time. And, therefore, it gets difficult for the data scientists to focus on core analytical work, which would give value addition to your business. Whereas, self-service analytics collects data from multiple sources of the company on a single dashboard, which eliminates the constant requirement of analysts to read the data.

Considering we are living in the age of constant data generation, if analysing these data is dependent on a limited set of people, then it becomes difficult for business leaders to leverage the power of analytics fully. Self-Service analytics provide access to data and reporting to all employees of the organisation, which, in turn, empower them to make informed decisions. This will allow data scientists to focus their time and efforts on the long term and high-value projects such as data governance, which is a complex process for organisations. Access to data allows employees to be more productive and also enables analysts to work on software development to bring in strategic benefits to businesses. A sound self-service analytical system will collect and integrate data across all departments such as finance, operations, marketing etc. and provides a unified report for leaders.

Narrowing Skills Gap & Increase Employee Flexibility

Self-service analytics has a smooth deployment process for organisations, which doesn’t require help from your analysts or the IT staff. It effectively integrates data and provides a unified dashboard view for employees to make day-to-day decisions, which in turn cut associated costs of licensing and related hardware. By utilising self-service analytics, business leaders as well as employees can analyse required data and create specific reports to address business challenges without the help of any extra resources. This can save a lot of costs on projects as well as create employee flexibility.

Alongside, self-service analytical tools enable collaboration between your employees and the core data science team, which indeed can provide better productivity for businesses. Collaboration allows the teams to have a better understanding of the data, which will ensure better accuracy while making decisions. Self-service analytics is a comprehensive solution for businesses to provide them real-time updates on their employees, customers, and the overall business. Apart from the minimum IT investment, self-service analytics can reduce costs for businesses, and therefore several small enterprises are now deploying self-service analytics in their organisation. Businesses that have implemented self-service analytics at the core of their organisations can stand out from their competition, reduce cost, and can increase profits by making informed decisions.

Robust Security For Effortless Decision Making  

Data security becomes extremely important for organisations when democratising data among employees. Self-service analytics tools come with a robust security framework, which ensures that employees and business leaders have to go through levels of encryption to have access to the required data. Apart from effortlessness in decision making these self-service analytical tools help organisations to create necessary security standards to protect business information, which isn’t a component with traditional analytics. It also urges businesses to make data understandable by everyone in the organisation, which creates a smoother flow of data, and the usage is also governed with self-service analytics.

In order to run a business effectively during this uncertain time, it is imperative for business leaders to focus on creating effective business strategies rather than worrying about data and its security, which can reduce productivity. Having self-service analytics will ensure proper data governance and will also help the IT team to create the necessary security framework of the organisation. Self-service analytical tools offer customisable security tools for each of your employees, which not only controls the data access but also prevents third-party organisations from accessing sensitive financial information of the company. Such tools automate business processes and allow every employee of the organisation to explore data and share visualisations while maintaining cybersecurity protocols to protect critical business information.

The post Why Self-Service Analytics Might See Bigger Adoption Amid Crisis appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.