Make Sense Of Your Data - AgileSense Blog

How to make sense of enterprise wide data to make critical business decisions?

Rafi Dudekula , 09 / 27 / 2011 , data integration, reporting, dashboards, analytics

You are a business user or a decision maker. Your organization uses many systems, some internally developed and others purchased from various vendors. The question is how do you make sense of all this data residing in all these systems? First we will see why it is so difficult to integrate data from multiple systems and after having some appreciation of the painful yet critically important problem to solve, we will see at a high level how AgileSense provides a solution.

Each system collects information relevant to that specific business process. For example your accounting system captures revenues and expenses, your CRM system allows you to store customers, sales and marketing related information and so on. With the proliferation of resource planning software (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics etc.) in both enterprises and small and medium sized businesses the problem of integrating and correlating this data from different systems to get an integrated view of customers or other drivers of business growth, has become a particularly painful or difficult problem to solve.

Decision makers are unable to take data driven decisions effectively because the data captured in one system is difficult to extract and merge into data from another system, to get an integrated view needed to take critical business decisions. There are three main reasons why data integration as traditionally practiced is so difficult:

• Any system has its own database schema or structure that is optimized for that specific business function. Usually this structure is very specific to the software package you may be using and is difficult to understand unless it is well documented.
• Assuming the schema/structures of all the required systems or subsets of needed data are known, it is still a difficult process to create a master data schema that reflects all the reporting or analytics needs of an organization.
• Assuming a master schema is successfully created, it is a fairly involved or difficult process to create data extraction processes, data transformation processes, summary or calculated data and finally create well designed, relevant, intuitive reports that makes it easy for decision makers to take decisions.

Typically this entire process, which results in a traditional data mart or warehouse, can take months to years to create and subsequently realize value. Even after that several companies cannot truly take advantage of such systems because the underlying systems that are the source of this data keep changing for needed upgrades, maintenance etc. Such changes require data mart or data warehouse teams to modify their programs and associated reports. All this takes significant time and results in slowing down the innovation within the business. Businesses then will be slow to take advantage of opportunities or react to threats from competitors and this may lead to eroding market share.

At AgileSense we recognize this challenge since we have seen enterprise data integration and analytics projects consume millions of dollars and tens of man years worth of resources, fail to deliver on the promise. AgileSense's mission is to provide end to end cloud based tools for business users with no programming experience, for creating powerful reporting OR BI OR Analytics solutions based on your data. In other words AgileSense empowers you the business user or decision maker to easily make sense of your data.

Our approach to solving data integration and analytics problems involves a series of steps:

• understand the business
• understand what information you will need to take decisions better
• devise a set of metrics or performance indicators or reports
• import your data on secure AgileSense platform
• call us for help with correlation of disparate data and related transformations
• create a dashboard, experiment with various types of charts etc., seek feedback
• continually refine the information presented through better metrics, better visualization, better drill downs or data exploration tools etc.

Now its your turn. Can you share what your most successful experience and a most nightmarish experience was with respect to implementing a data warehouse or a data mart or a plain reports project?