How Can I Improve Business Intelligence and Augmented Analytics ROI and TCO?

Business managers, owners and senior executives really want to do the right thing! The goal is always to improve the business, to hire the best staff and to satisfy customers and partners. To do that, the business must build a foundation of business processes, policies, technology and software that will support goals and objectives and make it easier, more timely and more efficient to perform tasks and complete activities.

When a business considers business intelligence and augmented analytics tools, there are always concerns about selecting the right vendor and the right solution. The solution must be affordable, it must have the right features to meet business requirements and it must be dependable. And, when considering analytical solutions, the selected product must be easy to integrate so that the business can pull together data from disparate sources, gather and analyze data easily. In the world of self-serve BI tools and augmented analytics, the solution must also be easy for the average business user to employ.

A business manager, IT team or executive team knows well how difficult it is to engender change in the organization and, if you are asking a team member to learn a difficult, new software product, it is not likely you will be successful. But, there are worse things than user dissatisfaction; namely what happens when your users do not adopt the software. What happens is that your return on investment (ROI) plummets and your total cost of ownership (TCO) goes way up.

That means you have a shiny new product sitting on the shelf, with nothing to show for your investment. So, how does one improve ROI and TCO for business intelligence and augmented analytics? By ensuring that users will have what they need to do the job and will WANT to adopt the solution, and by making it easy to achieve outcomes using sophisticated tools that are easy to use and will illustrate to the user that it is to their benefit to adopt the solution and use it on a daily basis.

Business users want to do a good job and, over time, they have learned where and how to engage with tools and processes that support their needs. If they have a software tool that they use every day, they aren’t likely to want to learn something new. BUT, if that something new is integrated with a familiar software product and allows them to perform analysis and to see, share and report on data from within that familiar (favorite) enterprise application, the business users is more likely to give it a try.

As your team members get used to the new application, and their managers see and appreciate the new, timely and fact-based information, and realize the benefits, the users who resist the adoption of the new solution are more likely to follow suit.

In addition to achieving better TCO and ROI on the augmented analytics, business intelligence application, the business will see improved results for other applications as well. Mobile apps, enterprise applications and even websites that provide critical information can produce and display analytics that are timely; data that answers questions and allows for planning problem solving. So, the addition of augmented analytics and embedded BI will allow your business to achieve better ROI and TCO across all solutions and applications within the organization.

By allowing team members to perform analytics within enterprise applications, the business can engender an appreciation for data, improve data literacy and improve business results. Data will no longer reside in silos and, with the integration of analytical capabilities using integration APIs, the business can find those all-important ways of saving money and optimizing resources.

For more information about Digital Transformation and how Augmented Analytics can support your business, explore our white paper: ‘Integrate Augmented Analytics and Digital Transformation to Achieve Continuous Business Improvement’, Embedded BI and Integration APIs.