Data literate employees can lead to successful analytics strategies

Analytics is definitely a hot topic today with enterprises constantly trying to find insight from a vast trove of data that they hold. In conversation with Tech2, Jaydeep Deshpande, Regional Marketing Manager, India and SAARC, Qlik, shares how enterprises can unlock the true potential of analytics and what Qlik envisions as the future of business intelligence (BI) and analytics. What more is analytics capable of that companies are not able to unlock as of now? Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. However, the real story with analytics lies in what you can do with it, and that is the hotter topic. At Qlik, we have speculated on what our analytics will unlock in the future. We believe more companies will (finally) be making use of predictive analysis. This has been a long time coming – today although most organisations have a few people doing more sophisticated statistical forecasting it’s not widespread; data from industry analysts has shown for years that less than 20 percent use predictive analytics broadly (i.e., as part of their BI projects). Decision makers in various organisations will be making wide use of shared, immersive analytic experiences. BI development has been focussed on small form-factor devices, but the focus will now shift to very large (think wall size) touch devices. This will enable teams of colleagues to work towards decisions through the side by side exploration of data in real thought time. In 2015, the #3 reason for not making a decision is disagreements with peers in 39 percent of cases; these kind of collaborative data experiences will mean that by 2021 we’ll be working in the data together. Being able to see and explore the whole story of you in your data is essential to understanding and improving your life. The range of skills and expertise needed to understand the data varies immensely and community sharing makes it possible. It opens up new and exciting ways to analyse life. You mentioned range of skills and expertise to understand data. What are the steps that Indian organisations should take to help their employees become more data literate? With increasing levels of automation and digitalisation across various industries, organisations in India are forced to adopt and evolve rapidly. According to McKinsey, fewer than 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated using current technology. However, about 60 percent of occupations could have 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated. In other words, automation is likely to change the vast majority of occupations—at least to some degree—which will necessitate significant job redefinition and a transformation of business processes. Modern analytics can help the workforce become more data literate. Organisations need to understand that employees need not be data experts or advanced statisticians but need easy access to data and analytics that will enable people to have more data-driven conversations and collaborate more efficiently. For example - sales people can communicate on patterns they see in their customers and can react to changes more rapidly on the ground, at the speed of business. Building local fellowship programs for individual data literacy training can complement and support long term engagements that will lead to organisational data literacy. Additionally, organisations should increase the concept of knowledge-sharing within the network. Such data-focused interactions make everybody a stakeholder in the analytics story. The result is an up-skilled and more data literate workforce that is also more analytical and involved in the success of the business. So what does this mean for companies who are shelling out a steep price for analytics specialists, data scientists, etc? Some businesses still rely on highly trained data scientists to derive actionable insights from data analysis, but not every business has the ability to hire a team of analysts or a consultant. We believe there is a greater value in empowering users across the organisation. That is why, at Qlik we focus on providing a simple, user-intuitive visual analytics platform and interface, and widespread adoption of this by users means effectively analysing real-time data to reduce costs and drive the business throughout the organisation. Most companies still use Excel for its basic analytics and number crunching. How is Qlik positioned to change that? BI solutions that exceled in reporting, but lacked analysis via interaction, have become a thing of the past. The shift in BI platform requirements, moving from reporting-centric to analysis-centric, means companies will expect to be able to digest and gain insights at a glance. Qlik understands that visualisation is key as users need to be able to understand their data in a way that is natural to them, breaking down the barriers between people and their data. When analysis is done in silos, it can be difficult to share findings with others to drive consensus. BI is no longer about collecting reports in the form of excel sheets, it’s about interactive decision making. At Qlik, we don’t just give people pie charts and bar graphs, but a platform that offers a wide array of intuitive visual analytics use cases, so that they can see the whole story in their data. Clearly, excelling in Excel is no longer a future-ready method in today’s disruptive marketplace.