Tableau’s powerful data discovery and visual analytics capabilities make it an ideal tool for enabling end users to achieve data driven insights at the speed of business. It puts data in the hands of the business users who have the most to gain from it in an intuitive manner that allows for rapid visualization and actionable insight through self-service analytics. Read more
Tag Archive for: Business Analytics
The BI software market is continually becoming larger and more complex to navigate. Any organization looking to implement, update, complement, or replace BI tools has surely been inundated with information from dozens of vendors offering potentially hundreds of business analytics technologies. How does one begin the process of narrowing the playing field and choosing the right solution?
Ironside is here to help. This article represents our thoughts on what to look for in a BI tool and explores some of the tools we think work well in different business cases: Birst, IBM Cognos Analytics, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Qlik, and Tableau. Read more
Ironside’s partners help us empower our clients and deliver value from data and analytics using the best technology for their particular business needs, which is why we’re excited to announce that we’ve added Domo to that list. Domo’s flexible, collaborative, and intuitive platform represents a strong approach to modern self-service analytics, and being a Domo partner lets us bring our clients actionable insights from diverse data sources even in low-IT environments. Read more
Domo is a tool that has stood out among the many data discovery-oriented analytics solutions now hitting the market thanks to how quickly it can have a practical impact on specific functional or industry business cases. It represents the realities of modern business:
- The questions organizations ask to support decision making are constantly evolving.
- Traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions aren’t flexible enough to cope with the speed of these changes.
- Business leaders need tools that enable them quickly, not tools they fight to use.
Ironside is happy to announce that one of our long-time professional services veterans, Scott Misage, will be taking on a broader management role as our Business Intelligence Practice Lead. With his history as a crucial contributor to and point person on many diverse and complex analytics projects across a variety of industries during his time as an Engagement Manager, Scott was a natural choice to head up the Ironside Business Intelligence practice and keep us at the forefront of innovation in the space.
About Scott
Scott is one of those rare leaders who is fully immersed in every possible detail of Ironside’s business analytics offerings but who can also deliver on the big picture and see the overall goals and strategies behind those individual solutions. This is why Scott has made a name for himself as a top thinker around both the performance of our solutions and their integration with one another.
Scott’s Specialties: Business Intelligence Advisory and Implementation, Performance Management Strategy, Enterprise Data Management and Architecture, Data Discovery, Bimodal Analytics, New Technology Discovery/Evaluation, Analytics Adoption
Focus and Goals
In his new role as Business Intelligence Practice Lead, Scott is committed to expanding our clients’ understanding of what a business analytics solution can do for them.
“It’s way more than just your standard BI reporting,” he says. “With all the advancements that have occurred, both in terms of the expanding focus on data discovery and the integration of predictive capabilities, business analytics is becoming this central connective fabric that really unifies and communicates across your whole environment. Through data, it unlocks the past, present, and future of your organization.”
This evolution is something Ironside already has a jump on due to Scott’s leadership in embracing and pushing forward a philosophy of bimodal analytics. Building on both our foundation in traditional enterprise BI structures and innovations in the areas of visualization, dashboarding, and data discovery, Scott is helping us provide the ad hoc capabilities that are in such high demand currently without compromising on the governance standards that allow analytics systems to function effectively.
“The whole bimodal analytics idea really hinges on balance,” he states. “It’s about getting a conversation going between your formal mode 1 BI infrastructure with all those recurring enterprise reports and your moving-at-the-speed-of-business mode 2 data discovery tools that uncover new insights. The key is to make sure there’s a process in place for this and that data quality gets kept as the main priority.”
Scott is also involved in building a deeper connection between the Business Intelligence and Analytics Advisory practice areas. Because there are so many tools out there on the market, having the ability to smoothly transition between evaluating options and building strategies and executing the technical elements needed to make those recommendations real is critical.
“We’re spoiled for choice in terms of business analytics tools, so it can get tricky to find the exact right fit,” he asserts. “Our practices together have the unique ability to both evaluate the tools from a technical and business perspective and then see the results of those evaluations through to completion, enabling the client along the way and delivering highly valuable solutions.”
If you’d like to see more of Scott’s perspectives as both a consultant and Business Intelligence Practice Lead, check out the articles he’s written on our website. You can also visit our Business Intelligence page to see what Scott’s team is involved in and how they can help you discover and build your ideal business analytics solution.
Master data management (MDM) efforts often get bogged down quickly due to business thinking that the entire process is owned by IT when in fact they need to set the standards. Knowing how to do that and what real MDM means will help make these efforts become collaborative and smooth to run. This article will answer several questions executives and other business leaders may have regarding MDM, in addition to proposing questions that should be used in order to leverage the full potential of MDM and illustrating real-world use cases. Read more
Ironside hosted a webinar on IT-Driven vs. User-Driven Analytics: How to Coexist. Rob Minogue, Director of Advisory Services and Scott Misage, Business Analytics Practice Lead, presented on how to bridge the gap between IT-Driven analytics and User-Driven analytics and innovative approaches to monitoring and governance.
Let’s go back a few years. You and your company invested significant amounts of time, effort, and capital to implement a business intelligence environment meant to serve the analytic needs of your organization and help drive insights. You and your team spent extra effort in developing the metadata and reporting that the business said they required, yet you’ve been hearing about users downloading free tools for analysis, your development request backlog has dried up, and a quick look at your audit logs shows flat, or worse, declining usage of your environment. What’s going on? Read more
Financial analytics and performance monitoring are vital components in an organization’s success. The ability to review and quickly react to industry and market changes is a critical competitive advantage that requires agile analytics to get right. The rolling forecast is a continuous planning process that provides your organization with just such an analytical vehicle. Extending beyond the traditional fiscal year review, it combines actual data with forecast results across a rolling number of periods to provide a consistent analytic horizon. An organization’s rolling forecast process must support variance analyses of performance versus targets using the most current information. This is necessary if they want to recognize and reflect actionable changes that will keep them on or get them back on course. Read more
Many organizations have adopted monthly or quarterly rolling forecasting as a primary tool for understanding their operational and financial performance. The rolling forecast is a process that includes the continuous evaluation of past results with future expectations across a set number of time periods to analyze trends and help the organization understand its current position. Read more
Ironside helps companies translate business goals and challenges into technology solutions that enable insightful analysis, data-driven decision making and continued success. We help you structure, integrate and augment your data, while transforming your analytic environment and improving governance.