Accelerating Business Insights With Unified Analytics

Accelerating Business Insights with Unified Analytics Contents Leverage the right tools for your sales challenges 3 Chapter 1 The limits of innovating with a disparate data estate 4 Chapter 2 Unify your analytics tools for the era of AI 6 Chapter 3 Five key benefits of integrated analytics 9 Chapter 4 Integrated analytics use cases for decision makers 11 Conclusion The impact of embracing a “one-stop shop” for analytics 12 Accelerating Business Insights with Unified Analytics3 Leverage the right tools for your sales challenges Your data holds the potential to revolutionise your business at every level. Today, AI and machine learning are giving rise to new opportunities in data analytics that provide deeper insights into how to drive growth, improve operational efficiencies and deliver exceptional customer experiences. To fully embrace the power of AI for data analytics, you need the right tools working in unison within a cohesive cloud environment. This eBook explores how using a unified analytics ecosystem helps remove common barriers to using AI and machine learning to power faster insights and get more value from your data. Accelerating Business Insights with Unified Analytics4 Chapter 1 The limits of innovating with a disparate data estate Data analytics helps fuel strategies for growth and optimisation by providing deep insights that reveal how your processes operate and perform. For example, marketing professionals can use data analytics to examine the correlation between social media impressions and spending to help them maximise impressions per pound. Meanwhile, analytics performed on sales, competitor and promotional data helps implement more profitable pricing strategies. In finance, it’s used to optimise expense management by tracking spending and budgets and flagging outliers that might indicate fraud. However, the reality is that many organisations face several barriers trying to extract these deep insights from their data. These challenges arise primarily from not having a unified platform that integrates all of their data and analytics tools. Disconnected and duplicated data Data silos take up more resources while producing lower-quality results Organisations often gather data from various sources, including multiple clouds, on-premises and third-party systems. A common issue arises when these sources aren’t effectively integrated, resulting in unmanaged data silos. When this happens, organisations must spend more time and effort to store and manage multiple versions of the same data sets. Data silos also make it harder to ensure data is properly governed, leading to potential compliance issues or security breaches. Meanwhile, data scientists working with silos often spend hours chasing requests throughout the organisation to extract, load and transform data in preparation for analysis. Concerning analytics, data silos can drastically limit the quality of an organisation’s reporting. Without a single source of truth for trustworthy data, organisations tend to rely more on descriptive analytics – that is, examining what’s already happened – as opposed to exploring predictive analytics, which can help determine what’s going to happen. Ultimately, data silos and duplicate data end up using more organisational resources while simultaneously making it harder to deliver reliable and impactful insights.