From Static to Smart: 3 Steps to Fuel the Evolution

If you’ve been around long enough to remember when analytics dashboards first came out, you may recall they made quite an impression. Instead of flipping through spreadsheet after eye-crossing spreadsheet to get the data we needed, we could suddenly find everything in one place. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, it was also laid out for us in colorful, easy-to-read charts and tables.

Who could ask for more? Business users could. And they did.

Static dashboards had a job to do, and they did it well. But they just weren’t enough, for two reasons:

• They weren’t action-oriented.
• They were missing the connection to users’ day-to-day activities, which made them far too easy to ignore.

So users started demanding better tools that would actually put data to work for them while they stayed focused on their jobs. Today, we have the solution: smart analytics. Now users have access to applications that leverage the latest in machine learning and other technologies to help them approach decisions more efficiently, with more relevant information, within the applications they use every day.

In 3 Steps From Static to Smart, we look at the three steps that encompass a successful transition from static dashboards to smart analytics:

• Phase 1: Enable. Bring your analytics and business intelligence (BI) platforms up to speed so that they can serve as a foundation for generating trustworthy data on a consistent basis.
• Phase 2: Embed. Integrate analytics into your business users’ daily processes by embedding embedding charts, visualizations, reports, dashboards, and even entire BI tool sets into the applications they use every day.
• Phase 3: Engage. Build a highly tailored, actionable application that (1) combines data, analytics, and transactions and (2) offers a look, feel, and flow that make it both visually appealing and easy to use.

While these three steps will take you from where you started (static dashboards) to where you want to go (smart analytics), they won’t keep you there. It’s equally vital that your app continuously evolve to meet the business’ changing needs and to accommodate additional users.

By offering users the functionality they need today and putting procedures in place to adapt to changing requirements, you can ensure that your data lives up to its full potential in empowering employees to work more efficiently, more productively, and more proactively.

To learn more about how to put smart analytics to work for your organization, download your copy of 3 Steps From Static to Smart.