Stick the Analytics Landing

No doubt that this is the Golden Age for analytics. Not only is there unprecedented demand for analytics skills, but there are an array of easy to use tools for the analytics practitioner to call upon as they master their skill. These support the analytics lifecycle of data acquisition, augmentation, integration, storage, prep, machine learning, and visualization.

Using this toolkit and their subject matter expertise, the analyst still needs to flip, twist and jump through complex business logic to deliver results that provide business value, however. Despite this monumental task, results may still fall short of the personalized and actionable analytics that individual business stakeholders need to make decisions for their domain. Requiring them to proactively hunt and peck for answers in a report or dashboard may lead to misinterpretation and misdirected actions.

To “stick the landing” for all their hard work, the analyst must therefore not only define insights for each stakeholder, but also place them into a context that guides interpretation. But manually doing this for every business stakeholder is naturally not scalable for the enterprise, and requires a level of automation that uses rules-based logic or machine learning algorithms that provide personalized insights and actions.

This could be as simple, for example, as a rule that pre-filters a dashboard based on an account executive’s sales region. Tools like Tableau do this well with user-based filters. Or they could be as complex as machine learning algorithms that consider factors hidden in the data to guide a stakeholder to action. Winnow Analytics does this by abstracting away the technical complexity of analytics into “apps” that deliver context rich insights and actions into subscribed stakeholders’ workflow, based on their personal profiles.

This additional and important step in landing value for the individual, organically expands to the enterprise. This in turn validates the investment in analytics and further underscores the importance of the analyst.

To learn more about Winnow Analytics, please visit winnowanalytics.net.