Tag Archive for: Strategy

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

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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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

The BI Tool Roundup: Finding What Fits

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The BI software market is continually becoming larger and more complex to navigate.  Any organization looking to implement, update, complement, or replace BI tools has surely been inundated with information from dozens of vendors offering potentially hundreds of business analytics technologies.  How does one begin the process of narrowing the playing field and choosing the right solution?

Ironside is here to help. This article represents our thoughts on what to look for in a BI tool and explores some of the tools we think work well in different business cases: Birst, IBM Cognos Analytics, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Qlik, and Tableau. Read more

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Ironside and Domo Partner for Flexible Self-Service Analytics

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Ironside’s partners help us empower our clients and deliver value from data and analytics using the best technology for their particular business needs, which is why we’re excited to announce that we’ve added Domo to that list. Domo’s flexible, collaborative, and intuitive platform represents a strong approach to modern self-service analytics, and being a Domo partner lets us bring our clients actionable insights from diverse data sources even in low-IT environments. Read more

Ironside Webinar Series: IT-Driven vs. User-Driven Analytics: How to Coexist

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Ironside hosted a webinar on IT-Driven vs. User-Driven Analytics: How to Coexist. Rob Minogue, Director of Advisory Services and Scott Misage, Business Analytics Practice Lead, presented on how to bridge the gap between IT-Driven analytics and User-Driven analytics and innovative approaches to monitoring and governance.

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5 Ways to Drive Analytics Adoption: Engage Your Organization

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Let’s go back a few years. You and your company invested significant amounts of time, effort, and capital to implement a business intelligence environment meant to serve the analytic needs of your organization and help drive insights. You and your team spent extra effort in developing the metadata and reporting that the business said they required, yet you’ve been hearing about users downloading free tools for analysis, your development request backlog has dried up, and a quick look at your audit logs shows flat, or worse, declining usage of your environment. What’s going on? Read more