When it comes to how businesses approach analytics and reporting both inside and outside of the enterprise, most efforts focus on commercial products and services. Yet a large percentage of external customers still don’t have access to the analytics they need, because the cost to deploy them stands in the way, according to a recent survey published by Jinfonet Software.
For several decades, the majority of enterprise business intelligence (BI) investments have focused on internal processes and users. However, when Jinfonet asked more than 400 senior IT and business professionals about their BI and analytics practices, 67 percent said they were serving external customers; 48 percent indicated that most of their commercial customers would benefit from analytic insights, but only 26 percent were getting them, suggesting that enterprises have an opportunity to improve products and services with analytics. The two greatest impediments to deploying BI and analytics to users were cost of deployment and choosing the right type of product.
“The gap between supply and demand of analytical insights for customers presents a huge opportunity for companies,” said Dr. Bing Yao, CEO of Jinfonet. “Our survey results demonstrate that product and service owners are aware of the need to enhance offerings with data analytics and insights, but are still struggling to deliver them – a challenge that we can overcome through embedded analytics.”
For delivering new or improved metrics and analytical insights to external customers, respondents said the most effective solutions were purpose-specific set of visualizations and analytics embedded within products, websites or applications (56 percent), followed by a dedicated web-based portal for analyzing and exploring data (45 percent).
Regarding those who identified themselves as internal users, 35 percent indicated they had a group of one to nine BI and analytics users, and approximately 16 percent had a group of more than 500 users. The most significant group sizes of internal users that could benefit from analytics, but don’t have them for various reasons, are one to nine (26 percent) and 100 to 499 (21 percent). The most effective solution for closing the analytics gap amongst internal enterprise users was also a purpose-specific set of visualizations and analytics embedded within products, followed by websites or applications (44 percent), and a dedicated web-based portal for analyzing and exploring data (43 percent).
The areas within an enterprise that could benefit the most from BI and analytics investment over the next 12 months are customer service and analysis (23 percent), commercial service operations (17 percent) and competitive market analysis (16 percent). The top drivers for making these investments are to improve output, quality and performance (41 percent), improve product and service offerings (33 percent) and reduce costs and increase profits (29 percent).
The survey results also suggested an increase in cloud-based analytics investments. When asked if they were building any new software applications to deliver new analytical insights and improve the overall application experience, 34 percent said “yes on premises,” followed by 32 percent that said, “yes, on a public, private or hybrid cloud.” Twenty-six percent of respondents said they are currently migrating existing databases, reporting or analytics applications to a cloud. If an enterprise had BI and analytics in a cloud or was planning to migrate components there, the main driver was to reduce IT operations cost.
Most companies have a dedicated team (staff or outsourced) of developers for reporting and analytics in their organization (42 percent said yes, they are a part of the IT). Despite this, teams are missing key development skills needed to close the gap uncovered in survey results; the top two skills teams lacked were reporting and dashboard development and data visualization.
Jinfonet completed this survey in September, 2016. Eighty-four percent of respondents were based in North America. For a complete copy of the raw data set, contact Matthew Pugh.
About Jinfonet Software
Jinfonet empowers companies to embed the most sophisticated reports and dashboards into web applications. Through the JReport analytics platform, developers and users gain advanced visualization capabilities with any data source. Every day, JReport delivers insights for hundreds of thousands of users at over 10,000 installations worldwide. More information on Jinfonet Software and JReport is available at www.jinfonet.com.
