How Consumerization is Changing the World of Analytics

Transcription

1 The Consumerization of Analytics White Paper

2 According to Gartner, consumerization allows people to self-design and consume unique experiences. Introduction In virtually every enterprise in every market segment today, technologies with roots in the consumer sector are making their presence felt, both in how organizations conduct business as a whole and in how employees approach their specific job function. The consumerization of IT reflects how enterprises are affected by, and can take advantage of new technologies and models that originate and develop in the consumer space, rather than in the enterprise IT sector. 1 Most often, discussions about the consumerization of IT revolve around the personal devices smartphones and tablets that employees bring into the organization to access enterprise data, as well as cloud-based productivity applications. However, as Gartner also notes, consumerization has a broader appeal and effect: easier access to technology is allowing people everywhere to use the machinery of Internet technology to self-design and consume unique experiences. 2 Analytics play a critical role in making business decisions and they have not been left untouched by the consumerization trend. For Line-of-Business (LOB) managers, who use analytics every day to make a wide range of critical business decisions, understanding how consumerization is changing the world of analytics and what these changes mean for the future of business decision-making is imperative. This paper will describe three key changes the consumerization trend is bringing to analytics and how LOB managers can take advantage of this trend to make better, more informed business decisions. The Consumerization of Analytics: A Sea Change Most companies have already shifted from initial resistance to the consumerization trend and are now embracing and extolling its many benefits and virtues, including higher rates of employee productivity. A recent joint report by Dell and Intel concluded that a more flexible and mobile workforce enabled by the consumerization of IT is more productive. 3 If you re an LOB manager, you ve probably experienced some of these benefits in your day-to-day job responsibilities, but alas, not in your use of analytics. You re likely still mired in long development cycles with your IT department and dependence on statistical experts or analysts to get you the analytic applications you need if you get them at all. You re probably struggling to combine your analysis of structured data in your existing data warehouse with demographic and location data as well as social media data stored in the cloud. And you re doing all of this in a vacuum, while the rest of the world is sharing and building on others innovations with a positive impact. Fortunately, everything you know about analytics is about to change for the better thanks to consumerization. And it s going to happen faster than you think. In fact, it s already starting to take hold in the most cutting-edge enterprises. Here are the three key ways consumerization is revolutionizing analytics and your job. Don t get left behind. 1 Gartner, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2012, July 31, Gartner, Maverick* Research: Never Mind Consumerization; There Will Be No Consumers as We Know Them, October 7,

3 1. This Time, It s Personal If you re like most decision-makers, the creation of analytic applications has long been the responsibility of IT or the corporate business intelligence organization. Grab a ticket and get in line for the services of statistical scientists and IT experts who don t really understand or know what you need. By the time they give you what they think you need, you either don t need it anymore or you need something entirely different. And don t even bother asking them to make changes. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. With the consumerization of analytics, wave goodbye to the days of topdown analytics and say hello to highly personalized collections of analytic applications. Consumerization decentralizes both the creation and consumption of analytics and moves it to the person who really needs it, the LOB manager. So what does this new era of pull-based, personalized analytics really mean? It means moving from passive consumption of analytics to taking control: you define and redefine the exact analytics you want including the ability to set unique parameters each time you run an app. It means no more waiting for corporate committees to roll out analytics hardwired to support the general requirements of dozens of users. For the first time, you can create your own collection of off-the-shelf applications or access private collections curated by data analysts for users like you. For example, let s say that the district manager of a national fast-food chain wants to take advantage of growth in the Hispanic market. Working independently with a local data analyst, he leverages all available data, including transactional, demographic, customer profile, and location-based data, such as drive times to each location. Then, he compares actual revenue by location versus potential customer spend to target underserved areas with Spanish language promotions. Collaborating with the data analyst, the district manager can further target his promotions by analyzing Spanish language tweets to identify customers who would respond to a family meal deal versus 2-for-1 offers. Personalization lets you take control of your analytics, enabling you to define and redefine the exact analytics you want and need. 3

4 2. Sophistication Made Easy Many companies talk about how they use data mining, Big Data, and predictive analytics, but limit access to these sophisticated technologies to a chosen few. If only a handful of employees with the highest profiles or priorities can access and benefit from these technologies, because they re too complicated for the masses, what good are they to your company s overall marketing programs or your competitive position as a whole? If these Consumerization makes it leading-edge technologies are locked away in an Ivory Tower easy to include sophisticated or in your corporate labs, and you, analytics technologies, the LOB manager who can truly benefit from them, cannot access giving you the most complete them, what is your company s actual return on its investment in these context for your strategic technologies? decision-making processes. Consumerization makes it easy to take advantage of these sophisticated technologies and include them in your analytics to give you powerful insight that makes a difference. With point-and-click access to cutting-edge analytics technologies, you get the most complete context for your strategic decision-making processes. Imagine if you could consume a sophisticated analytic application that meets your insight needs exactly, without waiting for highly skilled programmers or advanced statisticians? What if you could use an analytic application on the same day that you need the business insight, rather than waiting days or weeks to gain the insight for critical business decisions? With consumerization, these dreams become reality. Let s look at how the consumerization of analytics changes the day-to-day life of a mortgage loan officer at a community bank. Each day, she decides which loan applications to approve and which to deny based on predicting the likelihood of default. Rather than simply looking at credit scores or debtto-income ratios, the loan officer knows she can make better decisions for her bank with a personalized and more accurate predictor of mortgage default property, using a combination of demographic data, credit scores, financial assets, and property attributes. In the era of consumerization, the loan officer who really knows the business works with her local data analyst (or even independently) to easily leverage the power of predictive analytics. The result is a customized scoring app that incorporates the bank s unique historical data and community characteristics. She then incorporates powerful spatial analytics to incorporate location-based information. Using proximity to the nearest mortgage default and the ability to visually identify mortgage default hot spots with local maps, the loan officer can incorporate a more holistic view of default potential to make better loan approval decisions. 4

5 Adding Borrow to the Build vs. Buy Decision One of the key changes consumerization brings to the analytics world is the ability to easily create and share analytic applications through social marketplaces. Imagine browsing a website that contains hundreds of applications and downloading a few that seem to meet your specific requirements. Sound familiar? It should. It s an App Store for analytics. An enterprise-wide marketplace enables you to securely deploy and share analytic apps with others. They could then run and even customize these apps, resulting in a significant productivity boost across all lines of business. With consumerization, the possibilities are endless. 3. Go Social Today, you were probably locked in your office or hidden away in your cubicle, figuring out what analytics you need to get from your IT department s statistical experts to respond swiftly and appropriately to your competitor s latest move. Across the country, another LOB manager was asking similar questions for a different customer segment. Seem like a waste of time, money, and resources? It is. What if you could quickly share applications with a new co-worker or your counterpart in another department? What if you could even share an app with a key business partner so together you could create a strategic response to your competitor s move? Imagine finding an analytic app that helps you plan a long-term contract with your biggest customer. Now imagine that times ten. Consumerization enables LOB managers like you to use social networks to virally share and learn about the most interesting and valuable analytic apps without waiting to hear about them from the corporate office if you hear about them at all. Consumerization enables the entire community to help those who need analytics the most, starting with you. Here s how the social sharing of analytic applications could speed and improve the quality of decision-making, while reducing the cost of analytic app development. An LOB manager in a large consumer packaged goods company wants to identify metropolitan areas most at-risk for loss of market share. To do this, he works with his departmental data analyst to quickly create and deploy a sentiment analysis app that analyzes social media mentions in blogs, on Facebook, and in Twitter of the company versus its main competitors. Displaying the sentiment analysis results by Designated Metropolitan Area (DMA), the LOB manager can visually identify by location where the company is most vulnerable to competitors, and adjust his marketing and promotional spend proactively. He then shares the analytic app in the company s analytic App Store for other LOB managers to consume. The finance department downloads the app and then easily customizes it to enable them to better forecast category and brand revenue. The supply chain team downloads the app and customizes it to predict inventory requirements. Built once but shared widely throughout the corporation, the analytic application has delivered significant Using social networks to virally value to a range of departments, improving the company s overall share the most interesting and competitive edge. valuable analytic apps enables the entire community to help those who need analytics the most, starting with you. 5

6 The consumerization of analytics requires a collection of three key capabilities: for customized analytics of sophisticated analytics, such as spatial and predictive analytics technologies Alteryx: Leading the Consumerization of Analytics So now that you know the business benefits you ll experience with the consumerization of analytics, how are you going to achieve them? As with most paradigm shifts, it s going to take more than a single, hot new technology. Instead, the consumerization of analytics is enabled by three key technology capabilities that, together, enable the changes we describe in this paper. Alteryx is leading the way in the consumerization of analytics by delivering all three of these capabilities today. Fast and Flexible Platform for Customized Analytics Defining and redefining the exact analytics you need requires the fastest development and deployment platform possible. The highly visual, dragand-drop interface of the Alteryx Designer Desktop boosts productivity by eliminating the need for complicated coding. Plus, Alteryx provides analysts with a single platform for data integration, cleansing, transformation, powerful analytics, and visualization, so they can get you highly personalized analytics faster than ever before. The Alteryx platform enables analysts to consolidate data and analytic workflows into standalone analytic applications for personal use in the Alteryx Analytics Gallery. These customized applications can be configured on the fly to provide maximum flexibility for every situation. As you run an application, you can provide specific inputs, such as location or customer segment, for the decisions you need to make today. Alteryx enables you to further customize how you consume analytics by giving you the ability to create your own collections of off-the-shelf applications. You can also access curated collections created by data analysts or other users like yourself. Data analysts can consolidate data and analytic workflows into standalone analytic applications for personal use in the Alteryx Analytics Gallery. 6

7 About Alteryx Alteryx provides indispensable analytic solutions for enterprise companies making critical decisions about how to expand and grow. Our product, Alteryx Strategic Analytics, is a desktop-to-cloud Agile BI and analytics solution designed for Data Artisans and business leaders that brings together the market knowledge, location insight, and business intelligence today s organizations require. For more than a decade, Alteryx has enabled strategic planning executives to identify and seize market opportunities, outsmart their competitors, and drive more revenue. Customers like Experian Marketing Services and McDonald s rely on Alteryx daily for their most important decisions. Headquartered in Irvine, California, and with offices in Boulder and Silicon Valley, Alteryx empowers 250+ customers and 200,000+ users worldwide. Get inspired today at or call Point-and-Click Inclusion of Sophisticated Analytics To make sophisticated analytics, such as spatial and predictive analytics, accessible to LOB power users, not just the Ivory Tower experts, they must be integrated through point-and-click add-in modules. No longer requiring assistance from outsiders, you now have immediate access to sophisticated analytics any time you choose. The spatial capabilities within Alteryx Strategic Analytics can be used to provide immediate context for your results or even as inputs into your analysis. Pre-built modules help jump-start predictive analytics by eliminating the need to become an expert in the R statistical programming language. Using Alteryx, you can conduct ad hoc access and execution for just-in-time analysis without the normal handoffs or delays for statistical and spatial processing. With a simple, point-and-click interface that enables even the most sophisticated analytical processing, Alteryx lets you create and use high-end analytic apps in a fraction of the time previously required. Cloud-based Social Sharing Technologies Getting the right analytics into the hands of the right users starts with cloud-based, social technologies that enable the secure sharing of analytics. Whether it s 1-to-1, 1-to-10, or 1-to-100 sharing, the Alteryx Analytics Gallery provides a highly social experience that allows you and others to experience the network effect and easily adapt existing analytics apps for your needs. Plus, thanks to its open yet secure sharing model, Alteryx Analytics Gallery enables you to share analytics applications widely both inside and outside the corporate firewall while still keeping the underlying data and methodology secure regardless of location or device. Conclusion The consumerization trend is bringing three key changes personalization, sophistication, and socialization to the analytics market. Together, these three changes are combining to revolutionize how LOB managers use analytics in their day-to-day jobs. If you are a LOB manager, get ready to say goodbye to the days of top-down, generic analytics and hello to bottom-up, highly personalized analytic applications. Say goodbye to dependence on Ivory Tower analytics and say hello to individualized access to sophisticated capabilities. And say goodbye to working in a silo and say hello to sharing analytics apps across your organization and beyond. Alteryx is leading the consumerization of analytics, enabling you to create and consume analytics that improve your productivity, increase your return on investment, and enhance your profits. Contact Alteryx to understand how you can implement the right analytics solution for your organization today! 230 Commerce, Ste. 250, Irvine, CA Alteryx and Geographic Business Intelligence are registered trademarks of Alteryx, Inc. 12/12