Line-of-Business Personnel Need Information at Their Fingertips
For decades, organizations have been trying to make information and analysis available to the lines of business to improve their operations. Our research shows that analytics generate value for organizations in multiple ways, including by helping them gain a competitive advantage, increasing sales, lowering costs and improving customer experience. But analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools have traditionally been separated from operational applications making it difficult for organizations to take full advantage of the data they collect. Analytical systems were initially designed to be separate because of concerns that analytical workloads would interfere with core business applications. And while these limitations no longer exist or have changed significantly, the legacy of separate systems for analytics and operations persists.
Analytics tools that reside separately from operational applications are challenging for line-of-business personnel. When employees need to switch contexts from operational systems to analytical systems, they lose productivity and are less effective. Switching contexts takes time which may not be available, and it interrupts an employee’s train of thought. Separate systems also typically require significant effort to prepare data for analysis, making it the most reported time-consuming task in the analytic process according to our research. Operational application vendors sometimes incorporate analytics, but often the analyses line-of-business personnel need to perform require more data than is available in any single application.