Up until recently, most companies utilizing business intelligence (BI) software experienced a divide between non-IT employees and stored data. Data was considered the realm of IT experts and data specialists—and therefore it was the responsibility of these teams to run queries and generate reports on behalf of everyone in the company. As you can imagine, this inevitably led to reporting backlogs and more opportunities for miscommunications between teams.
But advances in BI technology have rendered this highly siloed approach all but obsolete. Today, the average non-technical employee can do much, much more with data. Here are a few examples.
Make Data-Driven Decisions with Confidence
Employees have questions all the time. It’s a natural part of almost any task, from compiling a presentation deck to planning a marketing campaign to measuring key performance indicators (KPIs).
When roadblocks stand between employees and getting the answers they need in a timely manner, it’s a frustrating experience for them. But it’s also a huge missed opportunity for the company as a whole, because questions tend to fuel better business decision-making, something that’s key in boosting profitability.
BI platforms today have made huge strides in democratizing data, or making it accessible, understandable and usable for the average employee—whether it’s a marketer, HR specialist, C-suite executive or engineer.
The result? The ability to access data instantly without having to wait for a gatekeeper enables employees to get instant answers to their questions, which facilitates quicker decision-making. This ultimately paves the way for more agile teams, not to mention clearing the way for IT specialists to focus on more strategic tasks than report generation.
The caveat is that companies must deploy a BI system that actually enables the average employee to ask questions, plus foster a data-driven company culture that encourages people to actually, well, use it. At the end of the day, BI adoption outcome will depend on factors like convenience, ease of use, simplicity and speediness. It’s entirely possible to get your entire staff asking questions of data and getting their own answers, but it’ll only happen with the right combination of tools and data-first culture.
Organizations spanning far and wide across industries are currently making moves to democratize data by giving employees everything they need to answer questions whenever they arise. Sterling Bank, for instance, has already seen analytics adoption soar by 230 percent after giving employees access to search-driven ad hoc reporting from ThoughtSpot—allowing sales and marketing teams to deep dive into customer data on their own, then use the results to optimize campaigns.
In short, The fewer hurdles standing between average business users and data insights, the more efficiently they’ll be able to pull them and put them to good use. The technology is there for organizations aiming to connect employees directly with data.
Socialize & Share Findings Broadly Throughout Their Organization
The ability to query data directly is the first step. The format in which insights return is another matter altogether. Most of us have experienced the frustration of having to transform information into our desired format—this can take even longer than the wait time on the original query, but cause more of a headache.
Today, just as they average employee can query data on their own given access to the right tools, they can also produce interactive charts—or entire dashboards full of data visualization models—automatically.
And interactive visualizations improve data interpretation in a few ways:
- Stakeholders can keep drilling down into these models to look at insights from a new perspective.
- Interactive charts allow employees to interpret and share information in whatever form is most meaningful, depending on the exact data.
- Interactive visualization models reveal the entire story rather than just one, static part of it.
The result? Employees are able to instantly share findings with other individuals and teams who need to see them, already in a best-fit format and shared workflow.
Dig into Why Things Are Happening in Their Organization
Today, employees of all stripes can employ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms with a click, no extensive background knowledge required. These algorithms can quickly unearth potentially useful insights at a much faster rate than human analysts can if they’re tasked with carefully digging through data, hoping to stumble upon something significant. This helps employees not only figure out what’s happening performance-wise, but why it’s happening—then they can take action accordingly, thanks to speedy AI insights.
CIO outlines just one potential usage for this game-changing technology: Retail executives can weave in data from sources like social media, customer information systems, ecommerce sites, etc. then use AI and ML to uncover insights pertaining to product sales and customer behavior.
What can the average employee do with data these days? A lot, as it turns out. It just requires the right tools and a company-wide effort to make data the foundation of decision-making.
