Guest post by Eoghan Doyle, Senior Solutions Consultant, Miagen

Businesses today know that accurate data is essential for their company's success. However, simply having the data isn't enough. The challenge for organisations, across all departments, is ensuring that key data is presented to users in a way that will expand their knowledge and understanding of any given issue.

What businesses are discovering is that embedded analytics can truly unlock the power of their data. Its ability to layer data and provide deeper - and, previously lost - insights is transforming how businesses operate across all departments. Its focus on user experience, meanwhile, is crucial as it puts the human at the centre of decision-making.

Defining embedded analytics

At Miagen, we understand that extrapolating value from data can be a headache - especially when that data is dispersed across different business intelligence platforms. It is time-consuming for the user and therefore delays - or even inhibits - the intended value.

Embedded analytics, on the other hand, integrates data visualisations, dashboards and analytical capabilities directly into business applications, tools and workflows. In doing so, it makes the data more digestible and accessible to both customers and internal teams. And, when users understand the data better, organisations can be quick to spot trends and respond in real time.

Supporting business decision-making

Digestible, easy-to-access embedded data gives control to employees by removingtheir reliance on internal IT teams to create data pipelines. Instead, they can combine data from different sources to create bespoke reports that address specific and nuanced needs.

Consider a marketing team in a large organisation, for example. At any given moment, they will likely have the performance of social media posts, online ads, web content and more, across multiple campaigns, to grapple with. By embedding their reporting tools with performance and engagement metrics, they can much more effectively analyse how their campaigns are performing. Based on this, they candecide if they need to change certain messaging or reallocate budgets - all in real-time, rather than retroactively making adjustments based on outdated monthly reports.

Analytics and visualisations can be embedded into applications such as SharePoint, or internal tools like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, to monitor businesses activities. For a HR team, this could enable them to create dashboards embedded within SharePoint to track attrition trends, helping them to make faster, more informed decisions and improve workforce management. Likewise, a better view of employee turnover and absenteeism rates can help HR managers to be proactive and spot trends such as staff burnout, addressing them before they become an even bigger issue.

Similarly, retailers can embed analytics into their inventory tools. These can be used to easily spot when items are out of stock or if there is a bottleneck in the system. Employees can then act early to solve these issues and minimise, or even prevent, disruption to business operations and customers.

Empowering teams to be proactive in such a way has another benefit: in an increasingly competitive business hiring landscape, organisations can provide greater job satisfaction that results in higher staff retention. It makes sense, employees who feel that have autonomy in their roles and who can see the real difference that they are making are far more likely to be motivated to stay and succeed.

Creating customer success

By incorporating this capability into customer-facing platforms, businesses can automate reporting and deliver crucial insights to customers, too, and in return, earn their loyalty. For example, energy companies could provide cost and consumption reports to their commercial customers, enabling them to see at what times are they consuming the most energy and how much it is costing them.

Giving control back to...