What is enterprise-wide analytics technology, and how does it play a part in understanding business processes? What are the challenges in rolling out a business intelligence tool?
Hi Knight,
Your question is fairly broad, but at the high level business or enterprise analytics is the endeavor at mining and capturing business transactional data from across the enterprise and then analyzing it using a variety of methods such as statistics, pattern recognition, etc. in order to make future business decisions.
These can be as simple as which day of the week do we make more money and very complex such as trying to extrapolate the future behavior of the stock market.
Analytics technologies and tools are those which are used to identify, extract, and analyze such data.
Adrian
All companies are looking for opportunities to A) Generate more revenue and/or B) Descrease costs, hence increase their margins. In order to do that they need to understand patterns: which days of the week at which times do customers purchase their products, what products, what demographic of customers, and also how efficiently is their business operating (business processes). To look into these high-level a business needs data, and a lot of it. Enterprise analytics (gathering company-wide metrics on anything and everything related to the business) will allow the company to data mine through mass amounts of data and identify patterns, gaps, bottlenecks, stalls in their processes. To do this, a team dedicated to analyzing the information and tools equipped to handle and assist in the data analysis are required. This is one challenege, resources. Many companies do not have enough money or people to allocate specificially to a Business Intelligence (BI) team and understand their enterprise analytics. Another challenge to do this would be the lack of data that is currently captured. Is your company capturing all customer service calling metrics? Line shifts? Resource allocations? Customer/product spend trends? Lastly, you need leadership buy-in to and to be ready to challenge the culture of the company: BI and enterprise analytics are new to many companies and getting people on board, excited to help, and prepared for the shift in ideaology will need to be carefully handled.
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