Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS

Most organizations are surrounded by an overwhelming amount of data, contained within various technologies and tools. Selecting the right technology and tools for your analytics implementation can be a daunting and overwhelming task, because there are so many options, and you are sometimes limited by what your company has used in the past. A comprehensive process for selecting the right type of data tools and technologies is beyond the scope of this book. However, following are some key principles to consider:

• Easy to use. Ease of use should be considered. As you bring on new staff in the future, you want a tool that can be learned and adopted by different user types.
• Business relevant. Is each tool or technology business relevant, and does it help you achieve your business objectives more rapidly? Stay away from tools that appeal only to your team’s intellectual curiosity.
• Increase your team’s impact. Does the tool or the technology make your team more efficient and have greater impact on the organization?
• Data integrity. Does the technology or the tool place a high priority on data quality?
• Extensible. A tool should be capable of growing with you and the changing needs of your organization. You don’t want to find yourself forced to migrate to a different tool because your business requirements have outgrown it.

We also encourage you to consult expert reviews from companies such as Gartner, GigaOM, and Forrester, as well as to consider peer reviews on analytics ...