Logi Analytics, an insightsoftware company and the leading provider of embedded analytics solutions for software teams, released findings from a recent survey of business professionals, The Path to Data Leadership: Embracing Business Intelligence and Embedded Analytics. This research explores the continued investments and improvements required to fully capitalize on analytics to reach maximum business impact. Research was conducted and gathered by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
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According to the findings, 75% of data leaders feel that the use of business intelligence and analytics is critical to informed decision-making within their organization, and 98% will increase spending on business intelligence over the next year. Among the business objectives driving the adoption of business intelligence are elevated operational efficiency, improved business decisions and strategy, and heightened forecasting accuracy. But continued investment is required to fully exploit the benefits and achieve desired business objectives.
While users feel that analytics are critical within their business, the research found, only 37% leverage real-time streaming, 36% leverage embedded analytics, 35% leverage augmented analytics, 23% leverage low-code/no-code and 22% leverage natural language querying.
However, 70% of data leaders plan to increase spending on embedded analytics throughout 2021. A key challenge in increasing this spend is that companies fall on vastly different data literacy curves, with 42% citing a skills gap and lack of employee training as a key challenge in the use of analytics.
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“As companies seek to accelerate the adoption of analytics to drive critical business decisions, business professionals are recognizing that the most effective approach is embedding analytics within the applications they are already using,” said Brett Hansen, CMO at Logi Analytics. “While challenges including the skills gap, cost, lack of security and lack of support still exist within the use of analytics for informed decision-making, data leaders are embracing embedded analytics to deliver insights within application workflow. This study validates that traditional BI and data discovery continue to fall short in delivering the experience and capabilities that users are seeking to make quicker, better-informed decisions.”
Of those with high data literacy, the research found, 49% are taking more action across the board, including investing in new analytics vendors and self-service to help close the gap. User-friendly dashboards and reports are critical to data literacy, and 66% claim their users want to consume data from a specific application, a capability only embedded analytics can provide.
Other key findings include:
- 93% of data leaders broadly use business intelligence across most/all business units.
- Data leaders are 3.5 times likelier to have significantly more people involved in buying decisions.
- Data leaders are 3.7 times likelier to believe they are maximizing investment in analytics.
“Working with Logi Analytics, this report uncovered the substantial need for continued investment in analytics and business intelligence capabilities,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG. “To flatten the data literacy curve, more businesses need to take advantage of functionalities already available and continue to explore opportunities to implement more advanced features like embedding analytics directly into applications.”
Various professionals at organizations with more than 500 employees across the U.S. and Canada responded to the survey. Responses came from an array of industries, including financial services, technology and manufacturing.
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