Modern Business Intelligence and Analytics from IBM
In the featured research "How to Implement a Modern Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform" Gartner stresses that analytics leaders must offer the right platform capabilities, roles, processes and integration with existing BI environments to meet user expectations. They explain that poor results stem from deploying modern BI and analytics platforms that are used as analytics silos, with no governance or proper integration with the overall BI strategy, or that offer the wrong set of capabilities to their business community. In fact, Gartner even predicts that "By 2018, a third of modern BI and analytics platform implementations will fail to meet user expectations due to poor design, lack of governance or improper integration within the overall BI landscape."
A key objective of a modern BI and analytics platform is to empower business users to create their own analytic content and insights. The Analytics Trust implementation scenario achieves that objective with a high focus on the reliability of the user built content. The Analytics Trust implementation scenario provides a level of self-service analytics to business users, without significantly disrupting the BI content creation processes in the organization.
The Analytics Trust scenario aligns perfectly with the direction we have taken with IBM Cognos Analytics. Cognos Analytics is an integrated solution for managed reporting and business user discovery based on a proven enterprise platform built for Analytics Trust. Cognos Analytics provides a highly scalable and secure environment for communities of users to consume, create and share insight from all types of data. It is an upgrade from previous releases of Cognos Business Intelligence that guides business users in the creation and sharing of new datasets, dashboards and reports – without requiring help from IT but with the ability to stay synchronized with IT managed data to avoid creating information silos or basing decisions on the wrong information. Full scheduling and alerting capabilities mean reports and dashboards can be centrally authored (and subsequently customized with the interactive interface) so users can monitor their areas of the business with minimal effort. This pre-built content provides a strong base from which the individual can further explore.
The challenge is to make sure that business professionals can be free to explore in a decentralized insight-creation environment that preserves information reliability while increasing agility and speeding time to insight. Cognos Analytics let's you work from trusted as well as other data sources to get a view of your business.
Smart data discovery tools such as IBM Watson Analytics play a crucial role in implementing an autonomy-focused model (Analytic Autonomy) and nurturing an information-driven culture. While Cognos Analytics provides instant visibility into what is happening in the areas you care about, sometimes you also need to dig into WHY something is happening.
Watson Analytics is a data analysis and visualization service on cloud that has no barriers to adoption; it can even be purchased on-line and there is a free edition. Virtually anyone in your business can use its guided discovery to automatically find insights – and the unbiased way the system looks at your data means it might even find insights you never expected. Watson Analytics automates the processes of finding patterns and deriving insights from data, applying statistic methods and advanced analytics without needing advanced skills to do so. Watson Analytics for Social Media lets you explore social data to look for additional triggers and insights.
Watson Analytics and Cognos Analytics work together through similar user experiences and the ability to explore trusted data from Cognos Analytics reports and models within Watson Analytics. This enables an understanding of both the WHAT and the WHY using a connected versus siloed approach. Insights that result from smart data discovery may prompt the user to edit a report or dashboard to track a new driver or to adjust a threshold / alerts on existing KPIs. This ability to operationalize an insight within the BI landscape delivers better results and smarter decisions.
The Analytics depth of Insight model is the most advanced scenario that requires tools that address complex use cases, and are more the realm of the very analytic- and tech-savvy user. While Watson Analytics targets the business professional, IBM SPSS Modeler and the Data Science Experience appeal to the statistically trained citizen data scientist and the highly skilled data scientist. These type of statistical models can be deployed into a business process which is another way to operationalize insight for smarter decisions. Smart data discovery can be used to accelerate the identification of key drivers / variables to use in the creation of predictive and prescriptive models in this scenario.
Gartner's position is that while vendors continue to progress their solutions there remain gaps that can't be solved by a single tool, leading to issues with solution design and integration pains. At IBM we have designed our analytic offerings to avoid these specific pitfalls of poor design, lack of governance and improper integration within the overall BI landscape. We believe our portfolio address all three scenarios identified by Gartner – Analytics Trust, Analytics Autonomy , and Analytics Depth of Insight and IBM is constantly building better touchpoints within our portfolio to support the entire analytics continuum.
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