Why a fear of data analytics is bad for business

Diving into your business data in search of pearls of wisdom seems like a daunting task until you appreciate that it’s easy to jump in without the need to write a single line of code.

Traditionally, businesses have their go-to data guy or data girl, sitting in the back office, who is called upon to do all the analytical heavy lifting, says Travis Murphy – Head of Business Intelligence Marketing with business analytics specialist SAS.

“When someone in the business needed some insight into the data they put in a request to the data guru, then the magic happened in the back office and they were simply handed back a result,” he says.

“These days there’s too much data, and also too much opportunity in that data, to leave the power of analytics locked away in the back office – we need to make it a mainstream business tool.”

One thing holding back many businesses is a fear of data among staff who are apprehensive about the complexities involved in shaping business data into knowledge and insight. To address this, Murphy often asks customers for a business spreadsheet and then loads it into visual analytics tools to show them how easily they can explore their data without writing any code.

“With our tools you don’t have to prepare your data, you just load it from a spreadsheet or even import it directly from the internet,” Murphy says.

“Seeing instant results tends to allay people’s fears and opens them up to look at their data in new ways while breaking down some of those traditional roles within the organisation.”

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More than just bringing to life numbers in a spreadsheet, visualisation tools can also help find meaning in unstructured data. Text analytics goes far beyond keyword searches; it can interpret meaning and sentiment from text such as customer feedback and online comments – providing clarity and critical insights amid a sea of noise.

While it’s easy to put the power of data analytics in the hands of all staff members, it is especially empowering for subject matter experts who have a keen interest in their data, but not necessarily the analysis skills previously required to dive into that data.

“We try to cater for those people and bring them into the world of analytics as citizen data scientists – someone who uses analytics every day as part of their business but they’re not a fully fledged data scientist or a mathematician,” Murphy says.

Analytics doesn’t always look backwards, with baked-in forecasting tools making it easy to look ahead, set targets, run scenario analysis and understand the business levers required to achieve your business goals.

The exploratory nature of analytics includes support for flowchart-style “decision trees” which help align the business to reach specific outcomes. For example, the goal of raising customer conversion rates can draw on a wide range of business data to show which customer group is most likely to convert based on previous performance and the steps required to get them over the line.

“Typically, business intelligence tools act like a rear vision mirror – letting you look backwards – and it’s certainly useful to see where the potholes were,” Murphy says.

“Advanced analytics allow you to do much more, as well as looking in the mirror you can also look forward through the windscreen so you can see the potholes coming and even perform ‘what if’ analysis to steer your own course.”