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5 Key Strategies to Adopt Today to Get Ahead
Analytics that don’t translate to action are a waste of resources. If you’re frustrated with unexpected after-effects from self-service BI, Doug Henschen has an action plan.
Doug Henschen
VP & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research
Your secret weapons for 2022 are the coders and builders on your technology teams. Hugh Owen details why a developer-centric strategy could make all the difference for your business.
Hugh Owen
Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer
MicroStrategy Inc.
Your thousands of reports could be costing you millions. Robert Tischler breaks down clear guidelines and best practices to help your organization stay productive in 2022.
Robert Tischler
Managing Director
BARC Austria
Are biased insights worse than no insights at all? Roxane Edjlali lays out the case for an adaptive analytical governance approach built on a ‘trust but verify’ methodology.
Roxane Edjlali
Senior Director, Solutions Management
MicroStrategy Inc.
Get your head out of the sand and into the cloud. If you haven’t embraced a cloud mentality, you’re not alone. But containerization could change that according to David Menninger.
David Menninger
SVP and Research Director
Ventana Research
Doug Henschen
VP & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
In short, the “democratization” of BI and analytics through self-service was only a partial success. In fact, when self-service initiatives were not backed by a degree of centralized management—in the form of unified data models and agreed-upon definitions and measures—the profusion of reports and dashboards sometimes led to conflicting and overlapping versions of the truth. These conflicts created a new source of frustration with BI and even distrust of reports and dashboards.
Business acceleration—together with the challenges described above—has fueled demand for more actionable analytics. There’s less time to navigate and interpret reports and dashboards, so there’s more interest in delivering concise, to-the-point insights at decision points within applications and workflows. The move toward actionable analytics is being enabled by four trends:
Next-generation embedding. Concise, targeted insights are increasingly delivered at the point of decision making within applications. This trend is being enabled by microservices architectures, rich application programming interfaces, software development kits, and prebuilt integrations both within popular enterprise applications (e.g., ERP, CRM, HCM) and within collaborative tools (e.g., email, Teams, Slack, etc.).
Natural language query. NLQ isn’t just a feature for querying from within dashboards and other analytical interfaces. Application vendors are adding NLQ features within their apps, and BI and analytics vendors are promoting this trend by turning NLQ into a utility embeddable anywhere, so users don’t have to navigate to separate reports and dashboards. Users can simply type in natural-language questions from within their transactional apps, or they can ask Siri or Google and voice-to-text integrations will translate their questions for mobile app interaction.
Low-code/no-code development options. LC/NC options are popping up everywhere, offered by application vendors, BI and analytics vendors, database vendors, and more. The trend is rising because the need for software is vast while developers are in short supply. LC/NC options enable systems administrators, power users, analysts, and domain experts to develop custom apps and to extend off-the-shelf applications. Analytics are invariably a part of these LC/NC offerings, enabling data-driven decision-making and action.
Workflow and automation. During the pandemic, we’ve seen “the great resignation” and employers struggling to hire enough workers. No wonder there’s huge demand to automate wherever possible. Why saddle remaining employees with repetitive manual work steps? BI and analytics platforms have had alerting capabilities for years. So, where thresholds and exceptions are tied to predictable outcomes and there is confidence about what actions to take, why not automate? Organizations are increasingly using bots, workflow, and robotic process automation capabilities with events and analytic thresholds triggering actions.
Hugh Owen
EVP & CMO, MicroStrategy Inc.
See how MicroStrategy is empowering developers.
The widening divide is indicative of a data-driven mentality—where information is not simply captured for after-action reports, but it is constantly used to optimize next steps and forward strategies.
Successful organizations over the last year have leveraged data and analytics as a vital strategic differentiator, using it to safeguard and empower their employees in the midst of a volatile market; delight their customers with increased personalization and targeted customization, and seamlessly navigate supply chains in a constantly evolving business landscape.
These organizations and industry leaders understand that the key to unlocking their data is to uniquely empower a corps of skilled developers with impactful tools to build amazing applications and solutions. This commitment to a data-driven mentality puts developers front and center in their respective organizations to act as change agents, weaving information into action for thousands of their colleagues, by building solutions that are rich with insight, action-oriented, and accessible to anyone.
What does being a developer in the modern world entail? Today’s required skillsets may surprise you. The arrival of low-code/no-code app development has changed the game—and gives business experts the means to develop high-impact enterprise applications.
This new breed of application developers can create new realities and experiences for thousands of others—faster than ever before.
For example, we all remember what happened in the early days of the COVID crisis. Stores were closed, factories were shutting down; people were scared. There was legitimate concern that supply chains would be broken, and that food insecurity could manifest as a serious problem…
One organization, a prolific MicroStrategy customer and retailer serving millions in the UK, put its developers to work to operate its business with the highest degree of available intelligence.
In just one week’s time, its developers built a COVID-19 response app. Within two weeks, the app was fully tested and deployed to more than a thousand store locations.
What exactly did the application do? With an unpredictable workforce due to quarantine recommendations, this app allowed the company to effectively staff stores based on available resources—redirecting people and products to the high-traffic locations that required inventory or additional assistance. This helped keep the shelves stocked with food, medicine, and other products their customers required during an especially difficult period.
This is just one example of what can go right—in a time when so much could easily go wrong. Whatever the challenges 2022 has in store for us all, equip, trust, and empower your developers. You’ll likely be thanking them by year’s end.