It’s the End of the (Analytics and BI) World as We Know It

Published Originally on Wired

“That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane, and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.” –REM, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”

REM’s famous “It’s the End of the World…”song rode high on the college radio circuit back in the late 1980s. It was a catchy tune, but it also stands out because of its rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness lyrics and — at least in my mind — it symbolizes a key aspect of the future of data analytics.

The stream-of-consciousness narrative is a tool used by writers to depict their characters’ thought processes. It also represents a change in approach that traditional analytics product builders have to embrace and understand in order to boost the agility and efficiency of the data analysis process.

Traditional analytics products were designed for data scientists and business intelligence specialists; these users were responsible for not only correctly interpreting the requests from the business users, but also delivering accurate information to these users. In this brave new world, the decision makers expect to be empowered themselves, with tools that deliver information needed to make decisions required for their roles and their day to day responsibilities. They need tools that enable agility through directed, specific answers to their questions.

Decision-Making Delays

Gone are the days when the user of analytics tools shouldered the burden of forming a question and framing it according to the parameters and interfaces of the analytical product. This would be followed by a response that would need to be interpreted, insights gleaned and shared. Users would have to repeat this process if they had any follow up questions.

The drive to make these analytics products more powerful also made them difficult to use to business users. This led to a vicious cycle: the tools appealed only to analysts and data scientists, leading to these products becoming even more adapted to their needs. Analytics became the responsibility of a select group of people. The limited population of these experts caused delays in data-driven decision making. Additionally, they were isolated from the business context to inform their analysis.

Precision Data Drill-Downs

In this new world, the business decision makers realize that they need access to information they can use to make decisions and course correct if needed. The distance between the analysis and the actor is shrinking, and employees now feel the need to be empowered and armed with data and analytics. This means that analytics products that are one size fits all do not make sense any more.

As the decision makers look for analytics that makes their day to day job successful, they will look towards these new analytics tools to offer the same capabilities and luxuries that having a separate analytics team provides, including the ability to ask questions repeatedly based on responses to a previous question.

This is why modern analytics products have to support the user’s “stream of consciousness” and offer the ability to repeatedly ask questions to drill down with precision and comprehensiveness. This enables users to arrive at the analysis that leads to a decision that leads to an action that generates business value.

Stream of conciousness support can only be offered through new lightweight mini analytics apps that are purpose-built for specific user roles and functions and deliver information and analytics for specific use cases that users in a particular role care about. Modern analytics products have to become combinations of apps to empower users and make their jobs decision and action-oriented.

Changes in People, Process, and Product

Closely related to the change in analytics tools is a change in the usage patterns of these tools. There are generally three types of employees involved in the usage of traditional analytics tools:

• The analyzer, who collects, analyzes, interprets, and shares analyses of collected data
• The decision maker, who generates and decides on the options for actions
• The actor, who acts on the results

These employees act separately to lead an enterprise toward becoming data-driven, but it’s

a process fraught with inefficiencies, misinterpretations, and biases in data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The human latency and error potential makes the process slow and often inconsistent.

In the competitive new world, however, enterprises can’t afford such inefficiencies. Increasingly, we are seeing the need for the analyzer, decision maker, and actor to converge into one person, enabling faster data-driven actions and shorter time to value and growth.

This change will force analytics products to be designed for the decision maker/actor as opposed to the analyzer. They’ll be easy to master, simple to use, and tailored to cater to the needs of a specific use case or task.

Instant Insight

The process of analytics in the current world tends to be after-the-fact analysis of data that drives a product or marketing strategy and action.

However, in the new world, analytics products will need to provide insight into events as they happen, driven by user actions and behavior. Products will need the ability to change or impact the behavior of users, their transactions, and the workings of products and services in real time.

Analytics and BI Products and Platforms

In the traditional analytics world, analytics products tend to be bulky and broad in their flexibility and capabilities. These capabilities range from “data collection” to “analysis” to “visualization.” Traditional analytics products tend to offer different interfaces to the decision makers and the analyzers.

However, in the new world of analytics, products will need to be minimalistic. Analytics products will be tailored to the skills and needs of their particular users. They will directly provide recommendations for specific actions tied directly to a particular use case. They will provide, in real time, the impact of these actions and offer options and recommendations to the user to fine tune, if needed.

The Decision Maker’s Stream of Consciousness

In context of the changing people, process, and product constraints, analytics products will need to adapt to the needs of decision makers and their process of thinking, analyzing, and arriving at decisions. For every enterprise, a study of the decision maker’s job will reveal a certain set of decisions and actions that form the core of their responsibilities.

As we mentioned earlier, yesterday’s successful analytical products will morph into a set of mini analytics apps that deliver the analysis, recommendations, and actions that need to be carried out for each of these decisions/actions. Such mini apps will be tuned and optimized individually for each use case individually for each enterprise.

These apps will also empower the decision maker’s stream of consciousness. This will be achieved by emulating the decision maker’s thought process as a series of analytics layered to offer a decision path to the user. In addition, these mini apps will enable the exploration of tangential questions that arise in the user’s decision making process.

Analytics products will evolve to become more predictive, recommendation-based, and action oriented; the focus will be on driving action and reaction. This doesn’t mean that the process of data collection, cleansing, transformation, and preparation is obsolete. However, it does mean that the analysis is pre-determined and pre-defined to deliver information to drive value for specific use cases that form the core of the decision maker’s responsibility in an enterprise.

This way, users can spend more time reacting to their discoveries, tapping into their streams-of-consciousness, taking action, and reacting again to fine-tune the analysis