23 Jul
Analytics to value: Time for analytics infusion in intranets
Business leaders invest heavily in business analytics tools, which pull data from a wide range of on-premise and cloud systems to achieve greater visibility into processes and track the KPIs that influence impactful decision-making. However, they encounter various bottlenecks in accessing data from these apps, leading to lower adoption of analytics tools and reduced business value and ROI.
A survey by MarketsandMarkets has found, “The global business intelligence market is predicted to reach $33.3 billion by 2025.” However, despite the benefits, business adoption of big data is still a struggle, with 73.4% of organizations seeing it as an ongoing challenge. Only 37.8% of firms report creating a data-driven organization, while only 26.8% consider themselves successful at building a data culture.
So, have you wondered if accessing business intelligence and business-critical data can be made faster and hassle-free?
If yes, then it’s time to infuse your business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools, such as Power BI and Tableau, within your intranet. Such integration enables business executives to easily track important business KPI in real-time for improved decision-making. Moreover, it helps maximize the ROI and value from investment in business analytics.
Let’s understand further.
Why do business executives find it challenging to access BI data?
Firstly, user acceptance is a significant factor that determines the success rate of your analytics solution. People who use other productivity tools to obtain insights may be set in their ways and resist change.
Secondly, when business executives need a vital, time-sensitive piece of information, they must open the Power BI app (or other BI app), navigate various dashboards, and filter data based on the required parameters.
Carrying out such a tedious drill multiple times affects productivity and doesn’t fit in these leaders’ daily schedules. Remember, “the average business worker uses 9.4 different applications for daily work. Every time they have to switch apps, they’re spending valuable mental energy on adjusting to a new context.”
Lastly, workarounds developed to overcome this obstacle aren’t helpful either. For example, a few organizations have hired team members exclusively to take screenshots of dashboards and email them to managers or publish them on the intranet. Such static images are neither interactive nor up-to-date with the latest figures.
When leaders cannot retrieve accurate data results timely, they tend to make poor business decisions and lose valuable opportunities.
Analytics to value - Integrate analytics within your intranet
To ensure timely access to data for informed decision-making and derive maximum value from investment in analytics, business leaders must introduce a dedicated BI and analytics workspace on the homepage of the organization’s intranet by integrating the BI app with the intranet.
Modern intranets have made it possible for organizations to communicate, collaborate, and consume information seamlessly. In short, they have transformed business operations to create compelling digital employee experiences.
A modern intranet acts as a centralized digital hub that hosts all the information, apps, and tools employees require in their day-to-day work. To create “composable” intranets that enable “multi experiences,” apps like HR, LoB, CRM, Power BI, and Tableau are integrated within the platform.
How does the BI app-intranet integration work?
Post integrating the BI app with the company’s intranet, users can –
- Subscribe to their preferred reports and dashboards relevant to their role, geography, department, etc., which are displayed on the homepage of the intranet.
- Access the latest interactive dashboards, which can be drilled down further to capture more information
- Click and open the respective dashboard in the BI app for in-depth insights.
Additionally, users can access reports on the go, hassle-free, and whenever they need them with a mobile intranet app. Imagine you are on a client site and need immediate access to a significant business metric to close a deal. Or, you are away from your laptop, and the senior management sends an urgent email for a particular KPI.
An intranet can also recommend personalized reports based on a user’s role, job function, department, location and seniority. You can also ensure sensitive reports are made available only to authorized personnel.
Moreover, executives can conduct natural language conversations with an intranet chatbot, via text or voice, that can help them access the required data. For example, the user may ask, “What were the sales of Product Y in 2018.” The bot then fetches the relevant data from the backend and responds in text or rich multimedia formats, including images and graphs.
Or, the user may say, “Please email me the graph for operating expenses in Q2-19.” Leaders can also set and receive personalized KPI alerts on their smartphones via the chatbot. With its NLP capabilities, the chatbot produces results based on intent and not limited by keywords.
How can Acuvate help?
Acuvate’s Mesh 3.0, an autonomous SharePoint intranet solution for enterprises, integrates with your BI app (Power BI, Tableau, etc.) and incorporates a dedicated BI and analytics workspace on your homepage. Mesh is built with some of the most renowned Microsoft technologies, including Office Graph, Azure Search Services, LUIS, and MS Natural Language Stack.
Additionally, as a Microsoft Gold Partner, we help clients seamlessly deploy intranet chatbots that leverage Microsoft’s powerful natural language processing (NLP) technology.
To know more about Mesh 3.0, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug