How Self-ServICe It analYtICS helpS organIzatIonS
Using Self-Service Analytics, organizations can carry out useful analytics on disparate silos of data, at a fraction of the cost of a regular analytics solution
Charles Darwin said that it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most adaptable to change. In the ever-changing digital landscape BI and Analytics is driving Industry 4.0. It comes under information economy were information is both the currency and the product.
Over the last decade, IT systems and processes have reached a point of maturity at which we now have tools and processes for IT. However, the IT systems and IT tools are very often disparate and operate in silos. This also applies to the data they generate, and that makes it difficult to correlate data from multiple systems and derive insights required for troubleshooting, trend forecasting, or IT planning.
According to Gartner, Indian business intelligence (BI) software revenue is forecast to reach US$150 million in 2015, a 15 per cent increase over 2014 revenue of $133.8 million. This forecast includes revenue for BI platforms, advanced analytics, analytic applications and corporate performance management (CPM) software.
Too many organizations use too many IT tools to run their businesses. Those tools may also support IT users, infrastructure and business applications. However, they do not support fast, accurate decisions — for IT or for business. The problem is all the data (and all the data formats) created by the tools is stored in silos that thwart actionable insights and visibility into organizational performance. Solutions exist to analyze all that data, but they typically are too complicated, require too much customization by experts, or are too time- consuming and expensive.
“Most companies want the IT analytics payoff, but few want to pay the steep IT analytics price,” said Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President, ManageEngine. “We’re uniquely positioned to drive the widespread adoption of this powerful technology. We know IT management and how to make it both powerful and simple. We know IT admins, managers, CIOs and CEOs and what they expect in analytics- driven insights. And we know business intelligence and analytics thanks to the 10 years our sister division, Zoho.com, has spent refining those technologies, which we’re leveraging in Analytics Plus.”
Why Analytics
Analytics is becoming as essential to organizations today as IT did years back.
Companies know that acquiring a new customer can cost heavy bucks. Therefore, to optimize their marketing spend, businesses are searching for answers within analytics to run their customer acquisition strategies. Data helps teams create broader and deeper customer insights and tracking a prospect’s purchase history, product usage patterns, and social media behavior is easy now.
In the last few years, IT service management (ITSM) and the IT service desk have become the cornerstone of IT strategy, enabling organizations to deliver highquality IT services efficiently. Now, organizations are seeking new ways to improve IT service delivery and efficiency via better ITSM processes. The only way to understand and identify process inefficiencies is to analyze data from service desk tools, and advanced analytics is the preferred way to perform that work. This ‘single set of truth’ powers the insight which stands at the core of any business.
Iyengar said, “Our own ITSM customer surveys concur with EMA’s findings. We believe Analytics Plus for ITSM marks a turning point in analytics — for ITSM and for IT as a whole.”
Selling technology to small businesses is a hard nut to crack but Sridhar believes that with right pricing and awareness SMBs can benefit a lot by generating curated insights from their businesses.