Jim, the Sales Head of one of the leading pharmaceutical firms receives the monthly sales dashboard from his Business Intelligence team. He has to explain to the board why the sale of their top-selling drug has been at an all-time low for the past two months in the United States. As if this task was not challenging enough, Jim must also present the reasons and strategies for rebooting the sales in next 12 hours to the board.
Now, let’s look at how Jim would approach the same business problem at hand in different eras.
2012: Canned Reporting Era
Jim formulates a few hypotheses that could be the reason for the drop-in sales and asks the data scientists in his organization to test those for him. While waiting for the results, Jim spends the rest of his time connecting the findings that need to be presented at the board meeting.
2016: Self Service Era
Jim has a ready-made dashboard which updates in real-time. He tests the hypotheses formulated by him and stops when few of his hypotheses are confirmed. This results in overlooking other important factors and a suboptimal conclusion. However, Jim has less dependency on data scientists and more time to connect the findings to construct a coherent story.
2020: Augmented Analytics Era
Jim asks a query, “Why are sales at an all-time low in the United States for the past two months?”. The platform automatically analyses the data from multiple sources and presents the insights along with actions that need to be taken to prevent the loss of sales, thus eliminating the possibility for any human bias to get the most accurate results. Jim then formulates the steps that need to be taken for reviving the sales of his company.
This is how augmented analytics-driven platforms are redefining the way we make data-driven decisions. A business person without any knowledge of data mining or statistics can derive the true value of data in real-time with minimum or no effort.
What is Augmented Analytics?
Augmented Analytics (mentioned as “Augmented Data Discovery”) featured in Gartner’s “Hype Cycle”, published in July 2017, for the first time which they claimed to be the “future of data analytics”.
More at https://www.zensar.com/blogs/2018/07/how-augmented-analytics-is-redefining-decision-making/