In today’s competitive environment, companies must rapidly adapt to changing business conditions by adjusting strategy. Such course adjustments generate a wave of response throughout the organization. An edict from the CEO to boost fiscal year profits, for example, can create a scurried search for reports and spreadsheets as business groups search for data to help fulfill their roles in the new strategy. And when the appropriate reports don’t exist, IT teams are called in to create them by sifting through data and building the required calculations.
Role-based analytics offer an alternative to the chaos that can ensue when companies seek a rapid change in course. While today’s organizations are data rich, this data is often not available in a way that is useful for various business functions. By collecting and analyzing data based on modeling and algorithms specific to business roles, role-based analytics software helps companies capitalize on existing data and empower employees to make faster, more effective decisions. This effective use of data is a critical component of creating competitive advantage.
Understanding Role-Based Analytics
In seeking a competitive edge, many forward-thinking companies have implemented performance management (PM) applications as a way to more easily measure and monitor their businesses with data from existing systems. To streamline processes and facilitate better decisions with this data, PM offers a high-level capability for linking strategy with operations, budgeting, forecasting, planning, and financial and regulatory reporting.
Role-based analytics takes such analysis a step further, making it easy for employees at all levels within a company to make better decisions and improve their specific processes. The pre-built models and algorithms used in role-based analytics integrate, format and deliver the appropriate data from enterprise systems based on the end user’s functional role. Whether an executive or an accountant, a sales manager or a production specialist, the end user spends less time gathering data and more time analyzing the critical key performance indicators (KPIs) built into the solution.
Because role-based analytics aggregate data into a central server-based location, personnel work from the same data source, ensuring consistent analysis throughout the organization as opposed to duplicated efforts that muddy the performance picture and inhibit quick decisions. The analysis is then delivered in a form specified by the end user, such as a dashboard, scorecard, gauge or Web report.
For example, while some functional groups may prefer analyzed data in the form of a Web report, a group like accounting might be more comfortable with a spreadsheet format. Management and executives often prefer dashboards because they provide a high-level view of KPIs like sales and expenses.
While most companies are on a level playing field when it comes to the amount of available data, corporate culture and business process sophistication varies enough to wipe out this equality. Some organizations approach decision-making on gut instinct, while others base it on sometimes chaotic spreadsheet views and still others actually perform detailed, albeit time-consuming, analyses. No matter how sophisticated the company’s business processes were previously, role-based analytics offer a fast, reliable way of enforcing consistent metrics and definitions throughout the organization to create a clear picture of performance.
Role-Based Analytics across the Company
Changes to business strategy often start with a simple email from the CEO. However, without the right technology, a seemingly straightforward mandate can create a scramble to monitor critical KPIs, slowing down strategic progress.
In a role-based analytics environment, each department is armed with accessible role-based data that can allow them to react quickly to a mandate for increasing fiscal year profits, for example, without getting mired in extraneous details. Each organization is equipped with tools for managing and tracking its effectiveness in this strategy.
Executives. Role-based analytics algorithms are prebuilt to measure and monitor exactly what correlates with executive-level strategy. Role-based analytics offer the ability to set thresholds that generate alarms if a KPI, like profitability, exceeds or falls below specified limits. Using dashboards, executives and managers can click on the KPI in question and drill down to locate the problem, in transactional detail if necessary, while the department where the issue originated may already be taking corrective action due to the real-time aspect of the analytics.
