Embedded analytics is a trend we’ve been writing and talking about since the company was founded five years ago. In fact, when we first started talking about it, embedded analytics was barely a trend.
But now it’s a bandwagon that just about every company — small, medium, and large — has jumped on. Just this past April, SAP senior vice president Mike Flanagan remarked, “Increasingly the analytics are moving into applications rather than standing apart.” When behemoth’s like SAP start talking about embedding, it’s arrived. And, of course, Gartner and other analysts are tracking the adoption of embedded analytics.
All Data, All the Time
Embedded analytics makes sense because as organizations consume more data, they need it easily accessible to applications and business processes that employees or customers use every day. It’s a way of building a decision support or customer engagement system that goes beyond intuition and guesswork.
Ever since Jeanne Harris and Tom Davenport published “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning,” companies have been trying to figure out how to do that. What mix of technologies and skills makes it possible to compete on analytics in a sustainable way? Embedded analytics turns out to be a methodology with several advantages. For one, organizations can leverage a vendors’ domain expertise rather than trying to build that expertise in house.
Data-Driven Decisions are Better Decisions
It may seem obvious now that data-driven decisions are usually better than those made solely on the basis of experience and intuition, but it has taken a while for that wisdom to make its way to the executive suite. But now that it has, it’s full steam ahead.
Companies want to make data-driven decisions and become data-driven organizations. There are, of course, barriers to that and they often fall into three categories: people, process, and technology. Technology writers have been mining this “vein of gold” almost non stop. Google the phrase “barriers to becoming a data-driven organization” and you’ll get close to a million returns.
Embedded Analytics Drive the Culture of Business Performance
Analytics have become a big part of performance optimization efforts for companies of all sizes, across all industries. And because embedded analytics have captured the attention, not to mention the resources, of many of these organizations, Zoomdata commissioned O’Reilly Media to create a guide that would help product managers evaluate the need for and value of embedded analytics.
The guide, Delivering Embedded Analytics in Modern Applications, provides a helpful overview of where embedded analytics fit in the overall analytics ecosystem, as well as practical advice for embedding visual analytics into modern data environments. It also includes a self-assessment tool to help you figure out whether your organization is ready to embark on the embedded analytics journey.
You can download a free copy of the entire report here.
