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The term 'Advanced Analytics' can seem daunting to the average business user and even to the average business enterprise but the process is not as complex as it may seem.
What is Advanced Analytics?
Advanced Analytics is comprised of numerous sophisticated analytical techniques, designed to parse, explore and analyze data and produce results to support business decisions. Fortunately, today's new self-serve business intelligence solutions allow for ease-of-use, bringing together these varied techniques in a simple interface with tools that allow business users to utilize advanced analytics without the skill or knowledge of a data scientist, analyst or IT team member. Advanced Analytics provides a 360 degree view of data from data marts, data warehouses, best-of-breed, legacy systems and other data sources. The analytical techniques and algorithms are designed to identify patterns and trends, pinpoint issues and the root cause of these issues and allow the enterprise to capitalize on opportunities and accurately plan for the future.
The concept of Advanced Analytics and cutting-edge BI solutions has evolved to include IT-enabled analytic processing and data manipulation and management, built on a foundation of flexible, scalable architecture that allows business users to perform in-depth analysis across the entire spectrum of analytical tasks from access to integrated data from multiple sources to data preparation, analysis, drill-down, reporting and sharing.
Self-Serve Advanced Analytics provides a roadmap to guide you through a maze of organizational data with tools and models that will bring together data from disparate sources and enable sophisticated yet simple analytics. These tools allow the enterprise to establish and monitor key metrics and to objectively assess results. But, perhaps the most important aspect of advanced analytics is the flexibility of these tools and the ability to go beyond restricted reporting or standardized analytical reports and processes to design and execute unique analysis that will address a particular issue or question for a specific project, or to address a newly discovered problem or question. These self-serve tools allow business users to dive deep into data and enable analysis and reporting that is as unique and creative as the user.
How Can Advanced Analytics Advance Your Organization?
With the right advanced analytics solution, your enterprise does not need advanced analytical skills. The advent of new and improved self-serve business intelligence solutions means that advanced analytics is easier than ever for the average business user to adopt and leverage. Your business users can perform advanced analytics, using sophisticated tools in an easy-to-use, drag and drop interface, with no advanced skill requirement for statistical analysis, algorithms or technical knowledge. Empowering your users to gather, prepare, integrate and analyze data, find patterns and trends, share findings and apply to strategic, operational and tactical activities means that users are more accountable for results and that the organization can more easily cascade objectives and goals and allow users to see and understand how their role and activities affects these objectives and goals. Your enterprise can go beyond data monitoring to ‘discover’ subtle and important factors that will identify issues and patterns, and help the organization capitalize on opportunities.
Advanced Analytics allows the organization to leverage Advanced Data Discovery features and enjoy the benefits of a truly intelligent solution that suggests relationships, identifies patterns, suggests visualization techniques and formats, highlights trends and patterns, and presents predictions.
Tools like Plug n' Play Predictive Analysis, Smart Visualization and Self-Serve Data Preparation allow the enterprise to transform the average business user into a Citizen Data Scientist and to better plan and forecast and make confident decisions. Your organization can test theories and hypotheses in a risk-free environment without making a market misstep and predict the outcome of pricing changes, new product introductions, supplier changes, added locations and other crucial proposed changes. With the power to test competitive and market strategies, management and business users can see and leverage the hidden value within the organization and find the small problems before they become large issues.
In the Gartner report entitled, 'Technology Insight for Modern Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms', published on September 12, 2017 (ID: G00331857), Gartner analysts predicted that, by 2020, 50% of analytic queries will be generated using search, natural-language processing or voice, or will be automatically generated.
Clearly, the trend toward self-serve Advanced Analytics is going to build in popularity as organizations recognize the significant benefits to the business user and the enterprise.
Advanced Analytics is an invaluable set of tools to help the enterprise engage team members, resolve issues and capitalize on market and competitive opportunities using factual, objective metrics and data for strategic, operational and tactical results.
