Answer any data question in seconds – here’s how!

One thing businesses learned from COVID-19 was to rapidly adapt to the changing situation in real-time. It’s more important than ever for businesses to have a truly data-driven culture versus having unplanned, isolated pockets of insights. It also becomes critical to equip frontline users with data-driven insights, thereby empowering such decision-makers with modern, self-service analytics to help your business grow.

Challenge with traditional analytics – Since the earliest days of BI reporting, IT teams and analysts curated data and reports for business users to consume. Self-service reporting became popular later, but it required days-long training and handholding to use visualization tools and for users to get used to newer platforms. In most cases, data was not catalogued. Or it was so poorly cataloged that it resulted in even more data and knowledge silos limited to certain sets of users only. Such dependency still lies with those technical teams charged with building reports for non-technical consumers.

Search-driven analytics for speed and scale – Search features are powerful; improves user experience; and you can find them inside most modern apps and websites. With Search-driven analytics, users are empowered to search for information in a much simpler way, engage with the data, and make faster business decisions (a long, complex process with the traditional analytics tools).

Four Reasons for Adopting Search-Driven Analytics – the Next Big Thing in BI

Improved user adoption with intelligent search – In a generic sense, search has transformed everyone’s lives—there is no training required to quickly access information anyone needs. For fast and easy access, users perform a simple Google search or ask Siri, et al.

As for search-driven business analytics, minimal training is required for users to independently get insights from retrieved data on the fly. Built-in, intelligent search eliminates data silos and provides users with faster results and insights—despite having bigger data workloads.

Democratized data across the enterprise – In the simplest terms, data democratization means everybody has access to the same information; there are no gatekeepers repeatedly creating bottlenecks. Puzzled by data-related questions, built-in search capabilities enable everyone to effortlessly seek and analyze data to 1) expedite decision-making and 2) identify opportunities for the enterprise.

Faster time to insights – Using yesterday’s models, anytime a question entered a business user’s mind (and with limited reports or dashboards not readily providing the answers), they had to contact multiple teams and stakeholders, getting tied up with data stewards, analysts, and IT teams. This tedious process takes a few days until an answer is finally delivered in the form of a new report.

But with search-driven analytics, the ability for users to take action far more quickly is greatly enhanced. Every user is equipped with data, and ease of using search-driven analytics establishes a true data-driven culture. Now armed with these faster insights, businesses can focus on critical growth opportunities, fine-tune operations, and make faster decisions for improving customer and user experiences.

Improved productivity and lower costs – Today, many enterprise data teams are spending significant time in collecting data to answer questions coming from users. Modern search-driven analytics eliminates this resource challenge.

One tangible benefit is lower operational cost (OPEX), lower per-user cost, and a significant reduction in the request queue for IT teams and others. Their improved productivity means they can cater to more critical business tasks and customer needs.

In addition, you eliminate business opportunity costs by empowering users to generate actionable insights by themselves. Discovering they’re able to quickly and easily answer day-to-day data questions on their own, this new-found ability enhances application adoption rates.

Bringing Modern Search Capabilities to All Businesses

Modern self-service is not just for data analysts—it’s for all users to engage directly with your data and get their questions answered quickly and easily. In an easy-to-use manner, search-driven analytics makes it possible for everyone to get the data they seek and draw insights by simply asking questions. By ‘talking to the data,’ they can use their own voice to instantly comb through sources and access insights—whenever and wherever they’re needed.

Leveraging AI, machine learning, natural language processing and natural language generation, we help our clients build augmented business and conversational apps with best-in-class accelerators. Talk to us to learn how—by leveraging search-driven tools or by integration with the likes of Alexa, Siri, and Google-like search interfaces—Infocepts can bring conversational capability into your enterprise analytics and platforms—making exploratory insights available to all users.