The role of BI analysts in delivering enterprise data intelligence to business users is rapidly evolving in the cloud-centric environment. Their key focus is no longer developing pixel-perfect dashboards only but also enabling the business to track metrics progress, anomalies, and opportunities more actively and with self-serve tools.
However, the productivity of BI analysts is currently hampered for two primary reasons. The development time for reports and dashboards is not reducing due to friction in data access, as the process is highly dependent on IT Teams. Moreover, the utilization of dashboards by businesses is decreasing as their needs are ever-evolving, and the feedback loop is not strong. This leads to various challenges such as increased ad-hoc analysis, multiple iterations, and redundant insights.
Back and Forth with IT
BI analysts spend a reasonable amount of time understanding the tables, columns, and data models for analysis. Due to friction & delays in getting the required data, chasing the IT team back and forth for access and understanding, the overall time to insights increases for the business users. For a particular project, it took me 2 weeks to access data and another 3 days to set up a meeting to understand the dataset and validate if it is sufficient to prepare the analysis.
Back and Forth with Business Users
BI analysts generate and deliver intelligence to different functions within the organization by building comprehensive dashboards on mountains of enterprise data. Often these dashboards are not actively used by the business as these can be overwhelming for the users. Their needs also keep evolving, which leads to ad-hoc reports along with sliced data in excel. Once these requests are fulfilled, users come up with more questions and ideas for analysis. Many times similar requests come from different people, regional teams, departments at different points in time. While getting the business engaged in data is excellent, this often leads to duplicate work and redundancy.
The Solution
Cloud solutions are significantly simplifying data ingestion via API and management. With that, there is an opportunity to align IT-data-business teams so that businesses can leverage data intelligence more effectively.
To reduce friction between IT, BI, and business teams, first and foremost, provisioning data for exploration, testing, and development should become much more straightforward. IT teams should provide access to warehouse or database data with appropriate governance in a point-click solution. This should be supplemented with a data catalog that makes data discovery easier. This will make BI analysts more efficient. They can search for the tables, track lineage, understand the full context for all tables/fields, and even bookmark the tables of interest for reference. This, in turn, reduces friction and frustration between both the parties – IT, who have to explain again and again, and Data / BI Analysts who have multiple questions to understand the datasets for analysis.
For improving productivity between BI & business teams, data & insights development and consumption needs to become much more streamlined. Imagine if BI/data teams could build charts and dashboards on a web platform, and business teams could access it side-by-side. On top of that, each analysis and report can be searchable through an interface. This would enable faster access to insights for the business users. The analysts can also reuse, set alerts & automate the work done previously and build additional requirements on top of it.
The good news is that at Bloom AI, we have built Bloom ONE that solves the above challenges and much more in a simple, low-code / no-code platform. If it sounds interesting, reach out to us at info@bloomai.co or request a demo today.
