In my experience of working alongside them, management accountants and indeed others working in analytical roles tend to find working with data curiously rewarding: the process of getting the numbers to reveal their story is a bit like cracking a crossword or Sudoku. The problem is that while the devil is in the detail, time-pressed executives just want the headlines, while the wider workforce needs something more easily consumable that they can understand and act upon. And typically many of the finance folk I used to work with were great at working with numbers, – but not so good when it came to presenting them in ways that non accountants could quickly digest.
To compound the issue, traditional business intelligence has largely been controlled, packaged up and delivered by IT. The typical lag of this model of dissemination – preparation of the data, followed by days or weeks to create bespoke reports or dashboards – prevents IT from being responsive enough to feed today’s voracious demand for real-time information.
Why Self-Service Visualization
That’s where visual discovery really comes into its own. Essentially an interactive form of BI, it allows everyday business users – including technophobes like me – to connect autonomously to a variety of sources, consolidate data and manipulate it without having to write a single line of code. Its drag-and-drop, point-and-click simplicity appeals to a broad audience rather than a statistically literate minority. For the first time, it allows people in any role to consume data the way they process thoughts: quickly, interactively and visually. Key insights can be conveyed in a very intuitive, accessible way that anyone can understand without lengthy explanation or interpretation – or “death by PowerPoint”.
With a rich palette of charts to choose from, rather than a narrow range of standardized metrics, it’s easy to see the big picture at a glance, then drill down into the granular detail beneath. Visual discovery lets those who wouldn’t normally get elbows-deep in data grasp the complex relationships between different business variables, quickly and easily. No longer do IT analysts have to run multiple, highly customized reports for every conceivable need, reducing both dependency and time to insight.
Visual discovery takes a further stride towards ‘pervasive BI’ by making information more inclusive. Apparently interactivity can allow up to 65% more BI users for every technical staff member, and this self-sufficiency provides much-needed agility in the face of ever-decreasing business response times, in turn facilitating a strategic shift in corporate IT. SAP’s offering is SAP Lumira which is available for the desktop or via the cloud starting at a mere $99 per user. You can even try it for free before you buy.
Quite like the brand name ‘Lumira’ with its connotations of shining a light onto things and wonder if it’s a start of SAP moving away from its previous policy of naming solutions simply by functionality – guess we’ll have to wait and see.
But there’s more to self-service analytics than quick-fire answers: extending the adoption of BI beyond the traditional elite community of data specialists to everyone in the finance team can help make a bigger contribution to the business. By making the process of data discovery engaging in itself, ideas can be ignited among those who may not have previously have identified as being creative or analytical. Enabling more of these ‘aha!’ moments among the wider workforce can bring tremendous competitive advantage.