1 Four Pillars of Business Analytics Improve customer experience and analytic capabilities with Actuate BIRT Business goals for applications must address data, people, process and technology, according to Gartner’s Jamie Popkin. In a keynote presentation at the Gartner Catalyst Conference, Popkin called this framework the Four Pillars of Business Analytics. “Gartner indicates by 2015, 25% of analytic capabilities will be embedded in business applications and designing data visualizations for web and mobile apps will become a major growth engine for the worldwide Business Intelligence and Analytics Software Market.” – Jamie Popkin, Managing VP, Gartner Transforming analytic data into usable business information and designing compelling data driven customerfacing applications remains both an art and a science, and a clear path to success is sometimes hard to identify. Inspired by Popkin’s talk, Actuate believes the Four Pillars framework, shown in Figure 1: Gartner’s Four Pillars of Business Analytics, can help application initiatives succeed. The Four Pillars can help developers and IT managers ask better questions – and get better answers – when they develop business analytics applications. An emerging set of design principles, inspired by the Four Pillars, provides a blueprint for delivering apps that inform, connect, and motivate end users. This best practices brief describes the Four Pillars of Business Analytics framework, then shows how you can employ the Four Pillars to understand your application needs and design and build applications that inform, connect and motivate users. The brief also explains why Actuate’s BIRT platform is ideal for highuser, highvolume analytic applications. Best Practices Brief
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Best Practices Brief
Four Pillars of Business Analytics Improve customer experience and analytic capabilities with Actuate BIRT Business goals for applications must address data, people, process and technology, according to Gartner’s Jamie Popkin. In a keynote presentation at the Gartner Catalyst Conference, Popkin called this framework the Four Pillars of Business Analytics.
“Gartner indicates by 2015, 25% of analytic capabilities will be embedded in business applications and designing data visualizations for web and mobile apps will become a major growth engine for the worldwide Business Intelligence and Analytics Software Market.”
– Jamie Popkin, Managing VP, Gartner
Transforming analytic data into usable business information and designing compelling data-‐driven customer-‐facing applications remains both an art and a science, and a clear path to success is sometimes hard to identify. Inspired by Popkin’s talk, Actuate believes the Four Pillars framework, shown in Figure 1: Gartner’s Four Pillars of Business Analytics, can help application initiatives succeed. The Four Pillars can help developers and IT managers ask better questions – and get better answers – when they develop business analytics applications. An emerging set of design principles, inspired by the Four Pillars, provides a blueprint for delivering apps that inform, connect, and motivate end users.
This best practices brief describes the Four Pillars of Business Analytics framework, then shows how you can employ the Four Pillars to understand your application needs and design and build applications that inform, connect and motivate users. The brief also explains why Actuate’s BIRT platform is ideal for high-‐user, high-‐volume analytic applications.
Best Practices Brief
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Best Practices Brief
Understanding the Four Pillars
Figure 1: Gartner’s Four Pillars of Business Analytics
1. Information management foundation (Data) The Data pillar balances governance and access in the information-‐driven enterprise. It requires connecting to disparate data sources – regardless of their type and location – to build a virtual data warehouse that is easy and secure to consume and use.
2. Organization (People) The People pillar brings IT and Business communities together to meet shared company goals. IT people require a visual, programmatic and assembly style development environment, with deep integration APIs for embedding processes. Business people need secure and personalized self-‐service, along with the ability to embed analytics in existing applications and display them anywhere – including wearable and mobile devices – to boost usage. For IT people, engaging business groups early in the application design and development process helps to drive conversations forward.
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Best Practices Brief
3. Fact-‐based decision making (Process) The Process pillar requires having the right information at the right time to make better, faster decisions. Because different roles make different types of decisions, it’s important to leverage the same data to support a variety of processes. For example, operational and executive users require dashboards; customers want statements, proposals and reports; and departments need performance scorecards. All of these outputs should be built with reusable components and shared across groups to ensure maximum use.
4. Appropriate technology platform (Technology) The Technology pillar encompasses development and deployment, with systems that break down silos of capability. Integrated, open, extensible tools support growth, so Actuate embraces standards-‐based content development environment and provides a flexible, scalable and secure automated deployment server (BIRT iHub). This combination has the flexibility to deliver data from any source and embed it in any application.
Another way to understand the Four Pillars is through the Business Analytics Framework shown in Figure 2. In this arrangement, the Data pillar is the Information foundation of the framework, and the People, Process, and Platform (Technology) pillars are broken out by their specific needs and requirements. It’s important to note in Figure 2: The Business Analytics Framework the “Business Models, Business Strategy and Enterprise Metrics” spans all of the pillars, as does system performance.
Figure 2: the Business Analytics Framework
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Best Practices Brief
Addressing Complexity in Customer Facing Applications Once you understand your application needs in the context of the Four Pillars, look at each application in terms of users and data. How many people will use an application, and how much personalized data each user will require from the app? As illustrated in Figure 3: Customer-‐Facing Applications – Complexity Comparison, applications with the most users and the highest volume of personalized data per user are typically the most complex, and the most challenging in terms of design, data access, management, and delivery. These applications require a secure, scalable platform – Actuate BIRT – to meet unique challenges:
• Take a customer-‐centric view, in order to focus on adding value
• Manage increased complexity as customers and data are added. These apps – particularly those used by financial institutions’ customers – must support millions of users who aren’t consistently tech-‐savvy and who have unique information requirements
• Serve enterprise analytics needs. These apps must move beyond departmental scale to support massive amounts of data and users
Applications in the upper-‐right quadrant – those with large numbers of users and high volumes of data per user – deliver more value to users when they employ analytics. Analytics is the discipline that applies logic and mathematics to data to provide insights that help people make better decisions. (Indeed, analytics is synonymous with “fact-‐based decision-‐making” found in the Process pillar.)
Four types of analytics – descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive – are illustrated in Figure 4: Four Types of Analytics. Each type of analytics starts with data and poses a question, and each requires some amount of human input to arrive at a decision. In the case of decision automation – a subset of prescriptive analytics – specific actions can be taken based on data without human input.
Each of the four types of analytics has a place in an information-‐driven enterprise and in your analytics strategy. They are not a hierarchy; prescriptive analytics are not better than predictive analytics, for example, and each type of analytics is applicable to specific use cases.
Figure 4: Four Types of Analytics
The ways users consume and interact with analytics vary. Embedded analytics, dashboards and reports are common methods for presenting analytics to users. Capabilities such as queries, data visualizations and packaged analytic solutions for specific business problems are often built into analytic applications.
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Best Practices Brief
How BIRT iHub Creates Competitive Advantage Once you understand the Four Pillars, the complexity inherent in many customer-‐facing applications, and the ways analytics can drive application usefulness, the challenges inherent in application design, deployment and delivery can seem daunting. It requires a powerful, flexible platform that can take data from multiple sources (including social media, data warehouses and enterprise applications) and personalize that data at enterprise scale.
Actuate’s BIRT product suite meets those needs. With BIRT, all data is synthesized through an advanced designer, called BIRT Designer Pro, and delivered through an enterprise-‐ready data integration, reporting, and business analytics server called BIRT iHub. In Figure 5: Features and Capabilities of BIRT iHub highlights some major features and capabilities of BIRT. Analytic content can be delivered to any device (leveraging a cloud-‐friendly architecture) in the form of data visualizations, dashboards, reports, and customer-‐facing applications.