Why should your company invest in analytics?
This fundamental question can get overlooked when we start talking about data sources, deployment models, mobile apps and other particulars. But Boris Evelson (@BEvelson), Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, has a straightforward answer to the question: Companies should invest in analytics to make money.
“We’re not talking about business intelligence and analytics and agile BI and Big Data just for the sake of these technologies,” Evelson (left) insists. “These technologies are all money-making technologies. These days, we find that enterprises that do not compete on information – who do not run their business by the numbers – really can’t make it.” Evelson and his colleagues have found that top-performing businesses – those growing faster than 15 percent year-over-year – tend to invest at least 25 percent more of their IT budget in BI than their poor-performing competitors.
But how does your enterprise ensure that analytics investments truly deliver bottom-line results? That was the subject of Leverage Agile BI to Deliver the Next Wave in Business Intelligence, a webinar Evelson presented on February 24. You can catch a free replay of the webinar at the link above.
What will you learn? We don’t want to oversimplify a nuanced topic, but Evelson’s presentation can be summarized using three overarching themes. To succeed, companies need to:
- become obsessed with their customers;
- use BI to analyze and understand those customers;
- build an agile business (including what Evelson calls “Agile BI”) to respond quickly to changing customer behaviors, wants and needs
Evelson backs up these assertions with data, and gives specific, actionable recommendations on what companies can do to increase agility. He also defines business agility and places Agile BI in a larger business context. Evelson notes that three out of 10 dimensions of business agility – marked with red arrows in the table below, and spanning market, organization, and process areas – relate specifically to BI and analytics.
In the webinar, Evelson walks you through the business processes, software development methodologies, staffing challenges, and technology platforms and tools that enable Agile BI, and concludes with recommendations and best practices.
If this sounds like valuable information, and you’re ready to use BI to make some money – who isn’t? – take an hour to view Leverage Agile BI to Deliver the Next Wave in Business Intelligence. It’s an investment that can pay big dividends.