No matter how much information is extracted from your company's business process networks and stored in your data warehouse, it will have little value in your decision making processes without adequate reporting structures and analytical tools. Distilling the intelligence requires that your BI solution produce informative reports on a timely basis and provide analytical tools that support your decision making processes.
Reporting and Analysis
Predictive Analytics
Today's enterprise IT environment vigorously supports the technique asking questions and deriving answers through simple data filters, data groupings, and other basic data "slicing and dicing" techniques. The analytics are housed in the mind of the user, as are the basic queries that support them in something that resembles a Socratic method of Business Intelligence.
But the large and rapidly increasing amount of data produced and captured in enterprise business process systems limits the value, and even the feasibility, of making decisions based on this crude methodology. The capacity of the human mind limits how many variables can be juggled at once, and even the data capacity of computer screens and computer-generated reports limits the usefulness of these methods.
The academic and scientific communities, along with technically advanced business analysts, have evolved a new set of techniques during the past decade that thrive on these large volumes of data instead of choking on them. They take advantage of the processing power of today's powerful computers to identify correlations and trends based on sophisticated statistical algorithms rather than crude data sifting methods.
Business analysis tools can mine enterprise data to answer questions and create predictions that can be used to build business strategies. The use of these analytical methods is not new in business But its presence at the center of business decision-making in a wide range of large enterprises is new, and is providing the companies that use the methods with more successful and competitive business strategies. What's also new is that while early adopters were very large corporations with very large IT budgets, today's inexpensive computing power makes the use of advanced analytics available to a wider variety of companies of all sizes.
Besides computer power, a company that wants to use advanced analytics needs to have skilled business analysts available to work with business experts in order to build the models, run them and to report and disseminate the results. This teamwork is required both to insure that the models are statistically valid and accurate and to make sure that questionable or meaningless results are rejected. This is particularly important when predictive analytics are used in a planning environment because a questionable result can lead to a very poor business decision.
Saama's consulting teams are particularly adept at delivering to you all the analytical skills you will need to bring your data warehouse together with sophisticated business analytical tools. They will work with your business experts and make sure that your analysts are at least as expert at using these tools and interpreting the results as they are, which can assure you of successful analytical and predictive analytic results.
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