What is Embedded BI How Can It Support Your Enterprise and Improve Business Results?

Optimize Technology Investment–Among the numerous advantages of embedded systems is the availability of crucial features within software, apps and platforms that are already in use in your organization. This integration ensures improved return on investment (ROI) and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for both the existing apps and platforms and for the new business intelligence solution, and optimizes the uses of these tools by making them easier and faster to employ and achieving swift results.

Assure User Adoption– Embedded BI for organizations is a wise choice, as it will enhance and enable user adoption. Your team has a workflow, tasks and activities and is probably on a tight schedule to complete tasks and achieve goals. They will NOT adopt solutions that are difficult to understand and use, or solutions that require them to move data from one place to another to perform analysis. If you want to encourage a chance within the organization and initiate data democratization, enable data literacy and ensure that your team will use new technology and tools, you must make them easy to understand and employ.

Encourage Data Democratization and Data Literacy– Your team has professional experience and career knowledge. But they are probably not data scientists or business analysts. If you want them to understand and use analytics, and to gain a deeper insight into how analytics can help them do their job, you must provide tools that engage them and allow them to expand their skills and training to include the use of analytics in presentations and staff discussions. Data literate team members are less likely to depend on opinion or guesswork to draw conclusions.

Cultural Readiness and Citizen Data Scientists– In a competitive hiring environment, you want to grow the skills of your team and retain those skills to advance your objectives and ensure competitive advantage. A well-trained team – one that understands data and can interpret that data to use in crucial decisions – is comprised of team members who can and will advance in your organization to manage goals and to use data and facts to achieve results quickly and efficiently. By transitioning business users with average technology and analytical skills to Citizen Data Scientists you can encourage your team to work with IT professionals and data scientists to refine and optimize data, to share analytics and use those analytics to make recommendations, solve problems and find and capitalize on opportunities. The data is there! Your team just has to understand it to become the asset you know they can be.

Enjoy Ease of Use– Selecting the right Embedded BI augmented analytics solution enables your business users with easy- to-use features and solutions so that they can quickly gather information, ask questions using natural language and receive clear, concise results with suggestions for visualization techniques and the ability to share and collaborate with other users. The benefits of embedded analytics assure that users can quickly adopt the analytics features and make them pat of their every day tasks. Single sign-on allows users to use familiar applications to gain insight into data without worry about extensive training or navigating silo applications and migrating data.

Confident Decisions and Data Literacy– The advantages of embedded systems are numerous, but perhaps one of the most important advantages for users is improved data literacy. All of your team members want to be productive and make the right decisions quickly, so they can move on to the next task but most of your team members probably lack analytics skills and data literacy. Whether they are curious about learning analytics or resistant to the idea, if they can easily gather and analyze data to improve their own workflow and make confident decisions, they are likely to give analytics a try. And as the team embraces and uses these tools, data literacy will improve and the team can more easily collaborate, using data wisely to make recommendations for change, optimize opportunities and resolve issues.

Ability to Gather and Use Info Quickly– Your team is probably much like the teams in other organizations: they have a lot to do in a very short period of time. If they don’t have the right information, or if the data they have is incomplete or difficult to understand, they will make mistakes (that’s understandable) and they will have to re-work the solution. That costs them time and can be frustrating, and it can also make them question their workflow and process.

Ability to Share Information– Every business users must work with other team members to accomplish tasks and make decisions. Providing access to analytics via embedded BI tools allows business users to gather and analyze AND share and collaborate with other users. This collaborative process ensures that all team members have the ability to weigh in on data, make suggestions, create reports and prepare presentations and recommendations for management and for team review and approval.

Citizen Data Scientist Transformation-Your team members provide value to the organization with career knowledge, experience and unique skills. When you provide the right embedded BI solution for business users, you encourage data democratization, improve data literacy and advance your team skills and comfort level with analytics, thereby enabling a transformation to a Citizen Data Scientist role. Power users and those with an interest in analytics will emerge as team leaders, creating reports and formats that can be used by others in the organization, and working with business analysts and data scientists to refine analytics for strategic purposes. These advanced skills will benefit the business user by providing career opportunities and will keep team members engaged in the organization and support team member retention and advancement.

• Supply Chain Management (SCM) – Users can perform real-time analysis to refine demand forecasts, based on market conditions.
• Sales Management – Sales teams and sales managers can engage analytics within customer relationship management (CRM) systems to review sales results and identify opportunities based on customer buying behavior and patterns.
• Healthcare Management Systems – Providers can utilize information contained within electronic health records (EHR), to review test results and identify risks and treatment plans.
• Human Resource Management (HRM) – The organization can analyze demographics, training, skills and benefits to plan for recruiting, assure retention, develop appropriate training, etc.
• Equipment Maintenance and Scheduled Repairs – Business users can analyze equipment, previous repairs and asset aging, to anticipate periodic maintenance, schedule downtime, assign and dispatch repair teams, etc.

The information provided in this section will give you an idea of the primary considerations for solution selection. You will also want to understand vendor stability, their team resources, the sustained skills and experience the vendor assures, and their roadmap for the future of their product(s).

Leveraging the Foundation of Embedded BI in Business Strategy

Choosing and deploying Embedded BI within your organization is a wise way to bet on your future. By offering your users simple access to sophisticated tools from within the familiar confines of your enterprise apps, you can simplify the democratization of data, improve data literacy and user adoption of analytics and improve business results and market competitive positioning.