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Success is in Your Little Data – The Ability of Good People to Use Good Data to Make Good Decisions.

This is a story about a lot of little data. More important, it’s about betting your business success on the ability of good people to use good data to make good decisions.

The digital economy is all about capturing, analyzing, and using information to serve customers. Most companies can significantly improve their business performance simply by focusing on how operating data can inform day-to-day decision making.

Universal acceptance of one source of truth is the first step in adopting a culture of evidence-based decision making.

Perhaps the best way to teach people how to use data to create business benefits is to provide them with data about their own performance.

A company uses its little data to improve performance by closely monitoring changes in key indicators.

The secret sauce is continual coaching aimed at improving the performance of every individual.

We have found that those that consistently use data to guide their decision making are few and far between. The exceptions, companies that have what we call a culture of evidence-based decision making, have all seen improvements in their business performance–and they tend to be more profitable than companies that don’t have that kind of culture.

Jeanne W. Ross – Harvard Business Review

Full Story: https://hbr.org/2013/12/you-may-not-need-big-data-after-all/ar/1

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How to get at the gold. Is it better to build or buy a data analytics solution?

Your company has checks sitting around waiting to be cashed. They’re hidden in your data silos. Giving everyone the ability to utilize all of this data to do their jobs better can give your company a distinct advantage over your competition. The question is how can you best get your data in a position so it can be most useful. Should organizations build custom solutions from the ground up or buy already existing packaged solutions or use a combination of the two? As with all choices, there are pros and cons to each of these options, making the decision all the more difficult.

Custom big data solutions come with their own set of challenges.

Building a solution from the ground up, should ideally allow a company to customize it exactly to the requirements of the specific organization. It will hopefully only include those features that add the most to the bottom line including features not available in a pre-built solution. Those developing the system will need to decide which of the hundreds of software packages are best for the 4 or 5 required elements of BI and how to knit them all together. After they’ve decided on the software, they’ll need to build, maintain, support, modify, upgrade to better components and train employees on how to best use it. While many may think that the analytics are the most important aspect of a BI solution, the most important challenge is working with the data to make sure the right data is being used, it’s accurate, everyone believes it’s accurate and any internal or external diverse data systems can be included into a single dashboard and reporting system. The reports and dashboards will also need to be available on a number of platforms as monitoring and alerts are essential to a fully utilized program.

Business Intelligence is a relatively new area for most so experienced talent is only available at a premium. There is a severe shortage of professionals skilled in the many elements necessary to build a complete solution. The experienced personnel will probably not be available within an organization and if they are working at the company, they are already probably being actively recruited to work in other organizations or for companies building systems for sale. The company will have to work (read- pay a relatively high salary) to keep the support staff on board for the life of the program.

The bottom line is that organizations may spend millions and many years to arrive at a solution that may not reflect the needs that were expressed when the project began.

Prebuilt solutions carry a different set of challenges.

Buying a prebuilt solution can initially save money as it should already have all of the software elements required, come with its own customer service and training departments, and should have a larger staff of dedicated developers who just focus on analytics for your industry and market, making it easier to integrate with pre existing solutions and data sources. One of the biggest challenges for a prebuilt platform is a potential lack of customizability. Most companies frankly don’t know what they don’t know or how to decide on which questions they need their data to answer.

Many "canned" analytics packages are only 15-20% utilized but the client must pay for the whole package. There will be reports, analytics and dashboards that must be built to satisfy the unique requirements and business practices for the company which can significantly raise the initial cost of the system. Adding new systems or new acquisitions will require custom work that may be extensive and expensive. Many solutions also charge per user with the fees becoming significant in a short time as best use systems require that most if not all employees have access to at least some of the business intelligence system.

We at Inteneo Systems believe that neither of these is the best solution which is why we’ve built a cloud based system that is the technical basis for an analytics solution totally focused on your company. There is no need to purchase software or hardware or compete for increasingly expensive analytics experts. Inteneo does all of the data transformation including internal data systems, individual spread sheets, social media, external competitive intelligence etc. while also working with your staff to develop the very early questions that will help your staff that lead to more and more complex questions.

We help you and your staff start answering questions from day 1 using the powerful Yellowfin Business Intelligence Dashboard and Reporting System https://www.yellowfinbi.com/.

This builds a system that is not something handed down by management as yet another system to use but is built by and for everyone in your company so they can do their jobs better. Our goal is to help your staff understand that they’re building a system for their benefit that results in a more successful organization.

We provide a solution so companies can benefit from the lower costs and immediate availability of our prebuilt data technology combined with the powerful Yellowfin https://www.yellowfinbi.com/ dashboard and reporting system that can answer your questions using live data.

The bottom line is that the total cost of ownership of building your own analytics system or buying a completely pre-built industry specific system can be far greater than its potential return. Let us show you how to solve this challenge quickly and economically.

The right solution is Inteneo Systems http://www.inteneosystems.com – providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can make the right decisions.

406-531-8119

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Leaders who ignore big data are falling behind http://www.matr.net/article-61874.html

Why Your CEO Should Be Awake Every Night Because of Big Data http://www.matr.net/article-60474.html

How Coca-Cola is Using Workforce Analytics to Create a Recipe for Success http://www.matr.net/article-61875.html

Little Data: The 25 KPIs Everyone Must Understand http://www.matr.net/article-62389.html

Data Silos Cause Billion-Dollar Error Which Results in Walgreen CFO Departure http://www.matr.net/article-61846.html

Big Data Demand Dominated By Marketing, Sales http://www.matr.net/article-54170.html

All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics http://www.matr.net/article-61479.html

Are You Losing Out on Customer Data? http://www.matr.net/article-54774.html

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