BEYOND DASHBOARDS

Beyond Dashboards: The Future Of Analytics And Business Intelligence? Analytics and business intelligence (BI) have long been understood to be fundamental to business success. Today, powerful technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), make it possible to gain deeper insights into all areas of business activity in order to drive efficiency, reduce waste and gain a better understanding of customers.Why then, isn’t every company doing so? Or, more importantly – why aren’t they doing so successfully? Truly benefiting from analytics – particularly the most advanced and powerful analytics techniques involving AI – requires developing a top-to-bottom culture of data literacy throughout an organization and this, in my experience, is where many businesses are still failing. This is highlighted by one particular statistic that came up during my recent webinar conversation with Amir Orad, CEO of Sisense. Orad told me that according to his observations, 80 percent of employees in the average organization simply aren't leveraging the analytics that, in theory, are available to them. It’s true that leadership teams and certain functions, such as marketing and finance departments, have spent recent decades getting to grips with reporting and dashboard applications. The same, however, often isn’t true of frontline staff and many of the professionals whose job it is to manage the day-to-day operations and service delivery of organizations and enterprises. Orad tells me, “This market has matured a lot … and the BI teams and analysts are now getting really valuable tools at their disposal … the challenge is the rank and file. “The people that operate the actual organizations haven’t leveraged the power of ML and AI because it’s very detached from their day-to-day. “We’ve solved the first-mile problem – the c-suite, marketing, sales. We've not solved the last mile problem, which is the wider adoption, and that's where we believe there's a massive opportunity, not only to get adoption … but also to really move the needle on the impact of BI and AI in many organizations."