How many of us have used the phrases…
- It’s a piece of cake
- Anyone can do it
- It’s as easy as ABC
- I could do it with my eyes shut
When it comes to business intelligence it should be “easy peasy” but for many organization it can still be a chore that takes days or even weeks to create a new report that senior management has requested.
In today’s dynamic environment, business users need access to all types of data, almost instantly. And they need more than standard, stale reports and executive dashboards. They need to be able to explore the data so they can discover new information and answer questions – not just about what happened, but also about why it happened.
Effective self-service business intelligence (BI) gives users access to all types of data in a way they can easily understand and use, making analytics approachable. It makes business users feel empowered to work independently when it comes to accessing data, generating insights and sharing information. With true self-service BI, business users can pull in data from different sources and combine it as they want for analysis and reporting. They can explore the data analytically, and use an intuitive interface to quickly build highly interactive and visual reports and dashboards. With SAS Visual Analytics users can select variables and drag and drop them to create a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of report. Users can even combine things like pie charts and bar and line charts, along with crosstabs, tree maps and geographic data.
Belgium insurer, Belfius Insurance, understood the value of an agile BI platform. Using SAS Visual Analytics, business users now do not have to wait for an IT expert to create the reports for them. According to Steven De Wever, IT Project Manager at Belfius Insurance, “The results have been stunning. Business users can now filter and explore their data, drill down to every detail, surface and correct annoying abnormalities, all while discovering relationships they hadn’t even thought of before”. Read more about the Belfius Insurance case study
To use another adage, “It’s not rocket science”, today to gain value from data and analytics, no expertise is required.
I’m Stuart Rose, Director, Global Insurance Practice at SAS. For further discussions, connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
