Category: Business

According to a recent report by InformationWeek on business intelligence, up to 28% of business professionals responsible for software selection in their firms, said that they have set the standards for one or a few analytics products in their organization. It was 35% last year, so this time apparently we have a 7% decrease.

Now, why has there been such a decrease?

The answer is not very different from what it was for the last three years. Almost 48% of BI decision makers say that “ease-of-use challenges with complex software or less technically savvy employees” is one of the main barriers to its increased adoption. Another major factor being data quality issues.

Although, the survey also found another 21% of decision makers did adopt several analytics and BI products for their firms, which is an increase from 16% from last year.

According to two different schools of thought, there have emerged two different approaches to developing and using analytics software. One school believes that if software, is simple to use, then people can handle even complex analysis. On the other hand, another school believes that if the software is made to be smart, then it can handle the analysis part on its own. So, it all comes down to choosing between simpler or smarter.

Products such as Qlik Sense, Tableau Elastic fall in the “simple to use” category and other popular ones from IBM and SAS fall in the smarter category. Tableau has gone as far as making their software mobile compatible too, adding further to the ease of use. A recent development by IBM is Watson analytics, a cloud-based service that is sure to help in high-end data analysis.

Even though, the choice has to be made between simpler or smarter software, the ultimate fact is that most people prefer software that is both smart as well as easy to use. Our own product ReachOut Engage intends to bridge this gap with an easy to use interface and allows users to analyze the data on a primary level and export data to third-party systems for further analysis. According to the survey, IBM and SAS also argue that their software uses smart features that also make it easy to use. Even then, this idea of smarter versus simpler when put in front of Steve Rimar, senior staff, IT architect at Qualcomm, brought 2 distinct vendors to the limelight. This renowned BI and analytics practitioner said that they have used many tools over the years and QlikView and Oracle OBIEE have proved to be their dominant standards.

When we look into the databases used, the report shows that 26% of decision makers involved in the survey, said that their firms used NoSQL databases, which is an increase from 19% in the last year. Another 22% said that their firms used Hadoop, which again, is an increase from 15% in the last year. Now, Hadoop is one database which is steadily and definitely gaining adoption as a platform for storing high-scale data that is not capable of being stored in other relational databases. Some of the major reasons for this increase in adoption rate include:

• Ability to store and process semi-structured, unstructured and variable data as pointed out by 31% of respondents
• Ability to handle massive volumes of data as pointed out by another 30% of respondents
• Low hardware and storage scaling costs as compared to conventional relational database management systems as pointed out by another 25%

All these facilitate big data analysis. All these also indicate the growing interest in big data analysis. Now, what exactly are the factors that drive this growing interest?

Some of the reasons are:

• The need for finding correlations across multiple data sources like internet clickstreams, geospatial data and customer transaction data as cited by 48% of respondents
• The need for predicting customer behavior as cited by 46%
• The need for predicting product or service sales as cited by 40%

Other major reasons include the need for predicting fraud and financial risks, analyzing social networks and identifying security risks.

On the whole, big data analysis is no longer just data warehousing as we know it at high scale as the report suggests. So, the bottom line is to not just depend on SQL tools alone to learn new things and use new data sources. As other tools are gaining popularity, data analytics and business intelligence and information management are becoming simpler and smarter.

Do you have a hard time managing all the “resistance to change” in your organization?

Many managers just like you, find it hard to incorporate any kind of changes in their organizations, especially, while introducing a new process or technology. Such resistance to change can become a major issue and more often than not, this results in huge losses.

So how do you minimize such resistance, or even better negate the same?

Here’s a thought, make the whole process of adoption systematic and comfortable for the staff. Such an approach ensures a smooth and successful transition. It can also save your company millions of dollars in the long run.

Here are some tips that can help you while incorporating technological changes in your organization –

Before adopting

• Do your homework – You need to make sure that the kind of technology you are looking to adopt is the right one and the best one for your organization. You need to do a thorough analysis of available options for that. You need to be well aware of the benefits it can bring and also how it will help your organization in the long run.
• Give your bosses a heads up if necessary – Sometimes your bosses may not be able to see the necessity to adopt the particular technology you are looking to adopt. You might have to put in some extra convincing efforts to make them support the adoption. So you will need to give them a heads up too, well ahead of the adoption. Support of the top management is very essential for technology adoption.
• Give your staff a heads up – If you let your staff know right from when you have plans of adopting new technology, they can be prepared. You should also let them know why you plan to do so. Make them aware of its benefits.
• Be sure to make everyone aware of not just the organizational benefits, but also personal benefits – Ok, let’s face it. People always do something they don’t want to do, only if they know it is going to benefit them in some way. Hence, if you need to convince your staff to adopt a particular technology, you need to address their personal concerns. You should show them how it can benefit them too.
• Test it on a group of people – Before actually adopting, you could choose a group of people and have them test the technology beforehand. You can use their feedback to assess the impact of the technology on the users. The more positive their feedback is, the more likely it is for the rest of the staff to adopt it readily.

After adopting

• Have fun training sessions – It is inevitable to provide training sessions of course, but if you make it fun, the staff will find it much more comfortable to use the technology. You can make your training sessions fun, by incorporating a little humour into your presentations or by having some lunch and learn sessions. You could even give out some rewards through tests.
• Engage experts – There might be some of those fast learners who get the hang of things pretty quickly. If you pick them out, you can have them help the others. It would be more comfortable for their friends to learn from them as well.
• Consider people who might need extra help – There might be people who might need an extra bit of personal help. You need to be available for one-on-one training sessions with them. Otherwise, they will hesitate in using the technology and may end up sticking to the old ways.
• Allow time for the transition – It is understandable that the people might take some time to get used to the new technology. You need to allow the time required for the transition and constantly monitor the use, to see if people are ok with it until it becomes routine.

Nowadays, technology is widely being used by almost every organization. Hence, it is important to know how to go about introducing a new kind of technology or incorporating changes to an existing technology. Technology is also constantly changing, which makes it all the more important to create an atmosphere to welcome change.