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NTT DATA Business Solutions | June 9, 2015

The Meaning of Discovery and Analysis in Business Intelligence

business intelligence

Data discovery technology is filling the gap between traditional Business Intelligence (BI) and advanced analytics by providing business users with the right tools to perform their own analysis and build their own insights. As I mentioned in a previous blog, SAP has the right tools to do this. In this blog, we will discuss additional aspects of data discovery one should know and consider.

The use of data discovery can frequently result in errors from either unreliable data and/or a misunderstanding of gained insights. However, if one considers and effectively applies the following recommendations, it is possible to eliminate or at least minimize those risks:

  • Define data standards within the organization (i.e. who owns the data)
  • Make sure data is cleaned to ensure good data quality
  • Define business process standards with clear roles assigned regarding how reports and analyses will be implemented
  • Define the users who will have access to specific data sources and the right BI client tool
  • Train the business users

Once these steps are followed, business users can successfully use Data Discovery & Analyses tools to generate new insights and are able to not only answer the question of “What happened?”, but also answer “Why did it happen?”, which will help create business value from the collected data and help grow the business. These are also the first steps of the SAP Business Intelligence Journey to increase business opportunities.

BI tool

 

Leading IT research and advisory firm Gartner believes the enablement of Data Discovery & Analysis as well as Self-Service BI will solve five major problems of traditional Business Intelligence, including:

  • Limited adoption and engagement by the business
  • Perceived lack of business value of reports developed by IT
  • The need for a technical expert, data miner or data scientist
  • Long development cycles
  • Narrow scope

Further, by giving business users what they need, not only can more insights be gathered, but data confusion will also be minimized. Data confusion typically exists in a lot of organizations because business users create their own data sources and analyses using Microsoft Excel. These users often combine all of the data sources to which they have access, regardless of whether they are enterprise data sources or their own data sources.

By following the right Data Discovery & Analyses approach and leveraging available SAP platforms and BI client tools, organizations can enjoy:

  • An easy-to-use and intuitive interface that is simple but feature-rich
  • An in-memory engine that provides the necessary performance required for interactive information exploration
  • Data connectivity to access multiple data sources without IT support

Please contact us at any time if you have questions. As a trusted business advisor and SAP partner, NTT DATA Business Solutions can help in every single step of the SAP Business Intelligence Journey.