Integrated Analytics
- What is integrated analytics
- Benefits and importance of integrated business intelligence
- Who should use integrated analytics
What is integrated analytics?
Integrated analytics mean fusing your data insights solution into everyday workflows and applications, helping employees and customers make smarter decisions.
An integrated analytics platform provides an end-to-end solution for delivering business intelligence from multiple data sources. This system gives users clear visualizations of up-to-the-minute data, as well as providing services such as revenue forecasts, trend predictions, and marketing strategy assessments — all in one place.
Savvy companies realize the importance of making decisions based on insights from their data, so they find ways to infuse data analytics into employees’ daily workflows. Another use of integrated analytics is synthesizing these data insights into customer-facing products and apps (also known as embedded analytics), increasing stickiness and driving new revenue. An app that tracks how fast a user runs a mile is cool, but an app that tells them how fast they ran that mile compared to everyone else running that route, or their mile time compared to others in their gender, age range, and weight range? That will keep users returning to the app, if only to keep seeking a first-place rating!
Benefits and importance of integrated business intelligence
Viewing a chart or Excel spreadsheet is a difficult way to uncover actionable insights. Your data doesn’t scream, “Concentrate on these markets to resolve your shipping issue!” or, “Write this ad copy to make 15% more of your viewers convert!” Revealing these insights is the job of a data analyst, who will slice and dice the data and dig for those insights. For those of us who aren’t professional data scientists, integrated analytics brings these insights to our desktops in an easily digestible format.
With integrated business intelligence, employees from every department have access to the same information and key performance indicators. They can all check the progress of relevant projects, campaigns, and initiatives, ensuring that there is consistency across the metrics and everyone is on the same page.
The key is that the information is blended into everyday business applications, where employees already go to do their work. Integrated analytics combine up-to-the-minute data with existing workflows — delivering insights, improving access to information, and enabling better decision-making.
Another benefit is the opportunity for improved teamwork and collaboration via integrated analytics. Too often in an office environment, and especially when teammates are all working remotely, each person works in a silo, without taking other departments’ objectives into account. Shared data visualizations powered by integrated analytics can help nudge everyone to zoom out periodically, look at the broader picture, and prioritize work so each individual can track how they are contributing to the organization’s overall goals.
Who should use integrated analytics?
Any company that needs targeted advice on how to achieve its business outcomes will benefit from using integrated analytics. Putting your data into context, and showing a picture of how all the data fits together, will boost productivity and produce smarter decision-making across all departments. Not only that — customers are starting to expect the level of service that is achieved through the right analytics tools backed up by an excellent data strategy.
Let’s look at who, exactly, in your organization can benefit the most from using integrated analytics and some of the methods that can make your department “most likely to succeed.”
First, the sales department. Companies that have truly adopted digital transformation will have probably also transformed their sales funnel. Data can be collected from customers across multiple channels using a variety of touchpoints. Organizations can use analytics to focus on particular segments of the journey and identify why potential customers are dropping out and the opportunities for optimization. A BI platform like Sisense is particularly useful here. The AI-powered Sisense Explanations feature does the heavy lifting by highlighting anomalies and points of interest in data, with options to dig deeper at any point for further exploration. No technical expertise necessary!
Inside the C-suite, savvy executives know that using advanced analytics to inform their business strategies will hone their competitive edge in the market. It can also boost in-house productivity, increase efficiency, and reduce excess costs.
HR teams have embraced integrated business intelligence in record numbers over the past two years. They understand that they can take charge of the wide array of data coming from company surveys, recruitment platforms, benefits statistics, and other sources to help keep their companies stronger and increase employee engagement.
Of course, analytics integration can also benefit many other departments, like IT, marketing, finance, and more. A BI tool like Sisense can help you avoid the need for a long deployment process to launch seamlessly integrated analytics so you can focus on driving value.
