ADVANCE YOUR DATA-DRIVEN PROGRAMS
With ever-increasing competition and evolving business dynamics, enterprises know that data-driven
decision making is imperative for success. Empowering business users with the right insights and at the right
time is a top priority for business functions and analytics teams.
But being cost effective while doing this at scale has been one of the biggest challenges enterprises face.
Self-service analytics, riding on recent analytics platform advancements, is proving to be the essential
element.
Many enterprises have made this a priority in the last few years, although with limited success. Low adoption
rates and uninspiring user feedback have marred any self-service initiatives. The reason for such results is
an incorrect approach coupled with the lack of a comprehensive strategy for rolling out self-service analytics
programs.
Having partnered with many global clients on highly successful self-service initiatives, we strongly believe
there is a need for a shift in the way self-service is approached. This ebook presents InfoCepts’ self-service
analytics implementation framework.
Here are five questions you should answer sequentially to start your
self-service analytics journey:
What does self-service analytics mean to your organization?
Where do you stand today with self-service capabilities?
Who do you serve?
How do you implement self-service at scale?
How do you operationalize self-service?
Understand the context and key goals you want to reach
What does self-service analytics mean to your organization?
Self-service analytics can mean different things to different people. WHY it is it needed? There are multiple value drivers—such as
Technology companies have innovated relentlessly, changing narratives reducing the time-to-decision, optimizing IT efforts, or empowering
in highly competitive environments. Illustrated in Figure 1, InfoCepts’ business users to manipulate data and generate their own insights.
uses the what, why, and context to generate awareness around Self- Ultimately, self-service is about increasing the overall productivity of
Service Anaytics. your analytics ecosystem.
Makes it easier to Often overlooked, the last question is, what is the CONTEXT of your
Use tool, Consume insights, Add self-service? Is it for consumer insights, or for developers? Is it for an
data, Explore, Build/deploy apps,
individual or a team? Most people naturally think in terms of “users.”
What
Operate, Support
Co-opt users But another concept exists pertaining to making business units within
large organizations “self-sufficient.” This is where the scale of self-
Reduce time-to-decision, service analytics gets interesting.
Transfer labor effort,
Self-Service Enable autonomy,
Analytics Why
According to CIO, 80% of digitally advanced organizations will replace
Improve productivity,
Enable business agility the IT-centric model with that of self-service by 2024.
We recommend you think about your context, its what, and its why.
How do you walk your organization through the change? The answer
User, Developer, Organization
Context lies in the next section.
Figure 1: Demystifying Self-Service Analytics
WHAT does self-service do? The goal is to make it easier for users to
do any number of things across their data-to-decisions journey. From
using tools for reporting performance metrics to exploring trends, and
on to advanced use cases such as quickly mashing up data to enrich
insights.
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Benchmark your current capabilities and maturity to define where you
want to go next
Where do you stand today with self-service capabilities?
People have become increasingly more data savvy over the last It’s important to assess where you stand on the continuum and where
decade, and technology companies are relentlessly innovating. The you’d like to be next. In our experience, organizations taking an
change is tremendous, and so is the need to swiftly embrace these incremental approach to improve their level of sophistication and agility
changes. tend to derive more value from data. As they begin to see success
during their journey, they put more effort in shifting to the right of the
InfoCepts’ Self-Service Continuum model (Figure 2) provides a quick continuum. The success builds on itself, as does collaboration between
way for your organization to assess its current state of maturity and business and IT.
readiness, and to envision its future state and path forward.
As you lay out the path of your analytics journey, it’s equally important
As the model suggests, the transition from basic to augmented is to know your business users. The next section provides a simple
a stepwise journey. Initially the expectation is more IT led, so as to framework for classifying business users; use it to guide self-service
provide users with customized reports and personalized insights. strategies.
In later steps it tends to be more business-led and
collaborative—empowering users with trusted data and new analytics
capabilities like, cognitive interactions and machine learning. The level
of sophistication and agility increases as organizations move from left
to right. Discover
Assemble
Sophisication →
Enrich Enrich
Explore Explore Explore
Create Create Create
Modify Modify Modify Modify
Navigate Navigate Navigate Navigate
Agility →
2000 1.0 Basic 2.0 Guided 3.0 Exploratory 4.0 Augmented 2020 & Beyond
The Self Service
• IT-Led • Business-Led, IT Supported • Partnership, Machine Assisted
Continuum
• Defined Reports, Views • Defined Data Sets, Questions • Schema Free, Open Questions
• Report Interactions • Visualization and Storytelling • Cognitive Interactions
• Deliver BI Efficiently • Democratize Insights • Innovate & Experiment
• Extending Enterprise BI • Bolting Self-Service Tool • Full-Stack Ecosystem
Figure 2: InfoCepts’ Self-Service Continuum
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Define your target self-service audience and their needs
Who do you serve?
Figure 3 below illustrates the most prevalent user roles and what self-service means to each of them. Business analysts, citizen data scientists,
and data scientists have skillsets that enable them to work outside traditional BI tool boundaries.
For a data scientist, say, it’s more than simply having access to data or insights. They need an environment to develop models in R, test their
models, articulate results and insights using rich visualizations, and, if successful, operationalize the model.
• Consume and interact with • Create and save personalized • Create new re-usable objects • Analyze enterprise data assets
pre-defined reports for views to answer recurring for consumption to create, test, and deploy
common questions questions • Update the reporting semantics advanced use cases
• IT builds enterprise data sets • Combine enterprise data sets for building new applications • Prepare and validate models
and reports with local data sets • IT provisions tools for based on hypothesis and
• Benefits with standardization • IT builds enterprise data sets data wrangling, reusable supporting data
and productivity and promotes valuable content/ preparation, and modeling for • IT supports provisioning,
insights for wider use power users verification, and deployment
• Benefits with improved time- • Benefits with improved time- upon approval
to-insight, user autonomy, and to-insight and responsiveness • Benefits with innovation and
resource allocation to business needs experimentation to support
business strategies
Figure 3: Key User Roles for Self-Service Analytics
For a self-service solution to be complete, it must deliver a diverse set of capabilities to benefit a range of users. Take time to understand your
profile, the data maturity of your end user community, their key objectives, and their user personas before furthering your self-service abilities.
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Design the right approach to scale up self-service capabilities
How do you implement self-service at scale?
Deploying self-service analytics goes far beyond implementing interactive data visualization tools. Executing at enterprise scale requires
alignment, awareness, acceleration, and agility. And it needs far more collaboration between IT, users, and analysts to provide ever-evolving
business acuity.
InfoCepts believes implementing an effective, self-service analytics strategy requires a fundamental change in thinking (Figure 4).
1 - Design purpose built solutions 4 – Setup sustainable operations
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work anymore; building a generic Keep long-term sustainability at the core of your self-service strategy.
self-service platform using a single tool is a recipe for failure. Design Ensure that you plan for roles and a support structure on both business
analytic abilities with user personas and their use cases in mind. and IT teams. InfoCepts’ experience reveals that certain operational,
tactical, and management areas require continuous adjustment to make
2 – Apply business-oriented mindset any such initiative sustainable.
Don’t look at self-service analytics as either a technology problem or
initiative. Identify capabilities that the business is really looking for
and onboard them while keeping things simple. Implementing a given Purpose-built One-Size-Fits-All
Over
technology because it’s the latest fad serves no purpose. Solutions Solution
3 – Ensure collaborative governance Business Technology
Over
Self-service analytics shouldn’t be an IT-only initiative. Nor should it be Orientation Orientation
only a business-driven priority. Rather, it requires close collaboration to
drive efficiencies in the data-to-decisions journey. Equal involvement
Collaborative Fragmented
and joint governance are also essential to the success of any self- Over
Governance Governance
service analytics initiative.
Sustainable Unsustainable
Over
Operations Operations
Figure 4: InfoCepts’ Approach to Self-Service Analytics
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Implement a holistic plan for a successful and sustainable
self-service analytics rollout
How do you operationalize self-service?
A transformation at this level requires several elements to ensure success, such as partnering with business, having leadership alignment and
clear understanding of required capabilities.
InfoCepts’ Self-Service Analytics Implementation Framework (Figure 5) can help you define and implement an effective self-service analytics
strategy. It’s built on the philosophy of breaking down silos, working as a single team, and with a process-centric approach.
At its center is our E-2-E model—Experience, Education, Engagement, and Enablers:
Current state Target state
The Experience element The Education element
identifies and prioritizes use advocates the importance
cases by personas, in addition of leadership alignment,
Experience Education
to using design thinking and adjusting the learning model
Use Cases Knowledge Hubs
lean startup approaches to per average user age within Design Thinking Learning &
Business goals Development
assess key analytic moments. the organization, and defining
a blended learning and
onboarding approach for
Current system Self-Service Impact
users.
Analytics
The Engagement element The Enablers element helps Assesment
is about driving shared accelerate the journey
Enablers Engagement
responsibility. It also focuses from raw data to insights. It Configuration Governance
on a data quality strategy that focuses on having the right Workflow Transition
Automation
ensures users’ trust, a means analytics capabilities, a clear
to dynamically augment understanding of impending
capacity, and architecture roadblocks, knowing how to
Strategy People Process System
governance to support address potential delays, and
design for various analytics other factors.
Figure 5: Self-Service Analytics Implementation Framework
capabilities.
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How do you operationalize self-service?
Our model directly influences three critical components—people, process, and system. If the correct processes
and skills (people) aren’t in place, even the best platforms (systems) can’t help provide timely business
insights. The true value of a self-serve capability isn’t in the tool itself, but the ecosystem that supports and
People
drives it.
Techniques such as stakeholder workshops and assessments can help answer questions such as:
• Which components and constructs are required for successful self-service analytics? Process System
• How to optimize collaboration between business and IT?
• How to select and plan for analytic capabilities to advance a self-service journey?
• How do we ensure financial viability of our solution and increase ROI?
These may sound straightforward, but stakeholders often have a different understanding of them, the business asks, and the short- and long-
term goals. Having a shared understanding of responses helps your self-service initiative succeed.
The assessment outcome is a well-defined strategy and an implementation—ready roadmap to meet your identified goals. It helps you assess
quick wins and sequence the implementation of capabilities based on business criticality and execution readiness.
The bottom line is as you embark on your self-service journey, start with right understanding of the above five questions. Self-service analytics is
an ongoing endeavor. Periodically reflect upon your priorities to adjust your implementation plans.
Watch “The New Self-Service Analytics—Going Beyond the Tools”
to learn more about successfully advancing your self-service journey.
Self-Service Analytics | www.infocepts.com 14
How InfoCepts Enabled Experience
• Lean canvas to identify pain
Education
• Curated KPI catalog by
Self-Service Analytics for points and capabilities subject area
• MicroStrategy data • User awareness session -
a Retailer wrangling for data system, data & reports
preparation • 2-day enablement
• Dossier templates for workshop for Business
guided data discovery Analysts
• R Sandbox Environment for • Data glossary and data
InfoCepts partnered with a leading fashion retailer having multiple Market Research team model walkthrough
luxury brands to provide self-service customer analytics.
Engagement Enablers
We started with a two-week current-state assessment to
• Top down approach – goals • AWS Cloud – Low Cost Data
understand its business goals, processes, expected functional
& maturity assessment Integration
capabilities, and existing technology landscape.
• Alignment with technical • Publish 36 certified
architecture council business views
Interviewing its CMO, we discovered that the retailer’s key
• Business case with multi- • MicroStrategy security
objective was to leverage data to uplift sales, design new
year ROI view design for production
promotions, and measure marketing campaigns effectiveness.
• Adjust support team system
responsibilities and SLA • Seamless integration of
The CMO, analysts, and market research experts previously had
confluence tool
to traverse six systems, such as POS, loyalty, Netezza data marts,
and email activity to prepare data that could provide such insights.
It was an extremely time consuming and effort-intensive process
As a result, users were able to perform analysis they weren’t
to reveal insights using canned reports from its MicroStrategy
able to undertake before, such as:
platform. Users often ended up using Excel spreadsheets to share
revelations. Assess customer buying Gain a better
behavior, segmentation understanding of
InfoCepts built a cloud-based, near real-time, self-service across region, channels, customer spend by
analytics solution to help accelerate the retailer’s data-to- and stores loyalty tiers
decisions journey. It improved time to insights by over five times
and reduced the cost of delivering them by 30%. Building the same Review customer growth Conduct buyer
solution on their on-premise data warehouse platform would have trends for various analyses
cost 15× more. segments
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About the Authors
Subhash Kari, Executive Vice President, Global Practices at InfoCepts
Subhash focuses on generating evidence-based insights, developing reusable solutions, and providing advisory services to improve business outcomes.
He leads our global practices team to develop offerings, grow customers, build alliances and strengthen competencies. Subhash brings two decades of
experience in providing mission-critical applications, data and analytics solutions and large-scale managed services to customers.
Praveen Jhamnani, VP & Head of Global Service at InfoCepts
Praveen focuses on driving customer advisory, designing service offerings that meet our customers’ changing needs. He leads our global competency
centers to develop strong expertise and solution frameworks in emerging technologies and solution areas. Praveen brings along his experience in helping
organizations build modern business analytics and information management solutions spans over 19 years.
Rohit Shah, Principal Consultant at InfoCepts
Rohit focuses on advising enterprises in their analytics journey, build reusable frameworks, drive innovation for customers to derive value from data.
He leads our Modern Analytics competency center and drives account growth initiatives. Over many years he has built and managed analytics teams,
delivered enterprise solutions for global BFSI and retail customers.
About InfoCepts
InfoCepts is a global leader of end-to-end data and analytics solutions with nearly 20 years’ experience enabling customers to derive value from
a variety of data-driven capabilities. Unique among its peers, InfoCepts operates with the scale of a global consulting firm, yet the expertise of a
niche partner.
InfoCepts elevates your data and analytics capabilities so your users can make smarter decisions—and businesses can achieve better
outcomes. We offer holistic solutions to your specific data and analytic needs related to modernization, optimization, innovation, and automation
of your data & analytic investments. We bring together people, processes, and proprietary technology on proven platforms to deliver predictable
outcomes with a guaranteed ROI. Everyday our 1000+ global associates, affiliated with cloud, analytics, data, and business centers of
excellence, ensure that we’re finding new and better ways to help you Stay Modern.
Modernize Data Advance Data- Support Data & Build Augmented Create Data
Platforms Driven Capabilities Analytics Systems Business Products
Applications
For more information
Website: www.infocepts.com Email: sales@infocepts.com
