Tag Archive for: Business Analytics

Analytics End User Adoption: Rethinking Our Engagement Strategy

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In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with three different clients who are struggling with the issue of end user adoption. Each described a routine set of activities, either completed or in process, that you would expect to see in a thoughtful change management program. Nonetheless, all three customers expressed frustration at the lack of user adoption.

Why is this? Do we need to rethink our traditional process for engaging users as we embark on our data and analytics journey?

In a word, yes. Read more

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Building Your Data & Analytics Roadmap One Use Case at a Time

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IT and business leaders share a common goal – to leverage the data available to them in order to make more informed business decisions. The first step to achieving that goal is to create a data & analytics roadmap, a task many companies find daunting. Where do you begin?

 

“Most organizations are ineffective in communicating data & analytics-related concepts across departments, resulting in suboptimal management and utilization of information.”

– Doug Laney, Gartner Blog Network

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The CIO and Analytics Strategy: Ironside’s Take

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CIO and IDG released the 2017 State of the CIO report this week. Their findings are useful not just for the CIO role in general but also for exploring the connection between the CIO and analytics initiatives. Looking at the report through the lens of data and analytics, I had three reactions to the survey results:

  1. CIOs should consider using analytics to drive business innovation, backing up their transformational and strategic activities with concrete resources.
  2. CIOs and line of business leaders should consider communicating even more and syncing expectations through data and analytics.
  3. CIOs should consider investing in a data and analytics roadmap to enable themselves as both business strategists and technicians.

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Understanding Data Governance: Tools, Documents, Processes, and People

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Data governance is a common need across organizations, and can be a very challenging subject to tackle. Understanding data governance’s components, what good governance looks like, and the drivers behind adopting it is essential to creating a successful governance effort. Read more

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3 Reasons Your Data & Analytics Roadmap Isn’t Helping You Reach Your Goals

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Creating a data and analytics roadmap is an important first step in helping your organization utilize data to achieve growth, understanding, and action. But often we hear from clients that their roadmap isn’t leading them to their desired destination. While many are successful in laying out the technical requirements, identifying the path to business outcomes, and building the right foundation, they still find themselves unable to make sufficient progress towards their goals. Read more

Take a Value Based Approach to Your Analytics Platform Migration

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Analytics platform migrations and upgrades are among Ironside’s core competencies. We’ve been doing them since our inception, and we do a lot of them.

Here are four common pitfalls that we’ve seen organizations from a variety of industries suffer from during the process. Read more

Defining An Analytics Strategy

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LEXINGTON, Mass., Dec. 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Ironside, a Boston-based data and analytics firm, just released an authoritative list of questions that they recommend business leaders try to answer now in planning for their analytics initiatives.

Today, it’s safe to say that the majority of businesses understand the value of analytics. They get that their data is important and that using it in the right way can have significant benefits. The problem, though, is that even though the business community as a whole acknowledges these facts, there’s still a lot of magical thinking around analytics tools and platforms out there. Read more

Boston Data & Analytics Service Firm Names New COO

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LEXINGTON, MA – Ironside, a Boston enterprise data and analytics service firm announced last week the appointment of David Michelson, Chief Operating Officer. Michelson joins the company with over 20 years of business and technical consulting leadership, helping clients solve their most critical business issues. Read more

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Top New Features in Tableau 10

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Tableau 10 was released on August 15th, and it is quite an upgrade. I’ve been spending some time doing hands-on testing of the new version, and I’m excited to share some of the new features I’ve explored with you.

In addition to a new custom font, new color palettes, and new themes that make Tableau more beautiful and visually appealing than ever, Tableau 10 has made great strides in bringing some of the most widely requested features from past releases into reality for this one. I’m going to walk you through some of the ones we at Ironside find most compelling and explain what the practical impact of each one is on the overall functionality of Tableau. This article will cover the following new features: Read more

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Ironside and Tableau Partner to Power Data Discovery

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If modern business data is a river, then traditional enterprise business intelligence is a bucket. Sure, you can pull some valuable and reliable insights at regular intervals that will help you take the pulse of what’s going on day to day, but there’s a much larger percentage of valuable insight that’s just going to wash by. That’s why having a complementary data discovery strategy is so important: it helps you be where you need to be in that flood to catch what’s most relevant to your current business concerns. One of the ways Ironside is helping our clients get to this level of self-service flexibility is by becoming a Tableau partner. Read more