Analytics in Mainstream
In this digital age, most of the IT department is focused on digitizing the core transactions to address their day-to-day function be it manufacturing, services, sales, marketing, finance and/or integration among them. This also includes the peripheral applications like budgeting, document management, etc.
Traditionally, analytics is always taken back-seat, even if any organization considers using analytics it is either used as MIS reporting or considered to be yet another fancy tool in form of dashboards for CxO audience of the firm.
However, in this competitive world where organizations are struggling to strike the right balance between their top line (maintain growth rate) and bottom line (reduce operational cost) and maintain their market share, it is pertinent to have visibility of the business across various functions (internal and external) to make timely decision. To be competitive, there is no time to first let the incidence occur and then do analytics to understand what went right and what needs to be improved.
This warrants the analytics initiative to be considered in mainstream. Analytics should be defined at strategic and operational level. The strategic analytics would aid organization to monitor how business is evolving over the period of time and helps to take informed decision in some key decision making. For example, which market to enter and when, what changes to be brought in some process etc. On the other side the operational analytics may require tight integration with some of the key transaction for informed decision making. These days there are transactional system offering embedded analytics to address the same. For example while approving a particular PO, one may want to analyse the item movement and availability of the same etc.
The organization need to spend lot of time to architect right analytics solution to address this requirement. It should have right mix of components right from embedded analytics, in-memory capabilities, alerting, ad-hoc analytics, predictive, and big data components.
At an outset, it is an insightful article. We have observed challenges in not able to draw the line between the MIS Reporting and the Analytics. In todays world, it is becoming more critical to have a mainstream analytics agenda, as the firms are believing more in having the best suitable applications for various business functions. The firms also want to have an on-line, faster, better and cheaper decision system on top of such disparate data sources, where the strong analytics architecture plays a vital role. This article should help giving some direction to that thought process.
In my view the management in every organisation feels that ,they need a tool for MIS reporting. However the issue is that every stake holder thinks reports just appear if we implement some tool. In india the organisations are maturing and are beginning to realise that it is just not plug and play, and lot more work is required and it cost more.