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Is the next step in reporting analytics on the horizon?

Is the next step in reporting analytics on the horizon?

Business intelligence has long been a matter of taking information from the past and turning it into insights that guide present-day decision making, and this is still where most companies stand regardless of how advanced their reporting analytics solutions might be. However, experts, analysts and, most notably, data scientists, have affirmed that the days of simple descriptive analytics are coming to an end, and the true goal is to establish predictive strategies that allow companies to become far more intelligent and fluid in their plans. 

The goal is to leverage more advanced big data and analytics programs that can actually help the firm gain accurate foresight with respect to emerging trends, objectives and market demands, while this is a highly tricky and sometimes impossible pursuit. Think about it this way: people have been trying to predict the future for thousands of years, and aside from a few shamans and Nostradamus, there have been very few instances of this actually being a reality. 

However, champions of modern analytics have affirmed that it is attainable, at least in the broad sense of identifying trends earlier in their life cycles to make swifter moves and take advantage. So, this is where reasonable expectations come into play, in that business leaders cannot expect these technologies to tell them where a car is going to crash at what time and who is driving, but rather that there are impending infrastructure problems on the road that might yield a higher risk of accidents. 

With reporting analytics, businesses need to first focus on getting the intermediate skills down right, and will only be able to move toward predictive capabilities when they have optimized responsive and descriptive pursuits. The combination of newer iterations of the technology alongside a greater understanding of how to use them and what they can do is expected to push industries closer to the predictive angle in 2015. 

Case in point
MediaPost recently reported that programmatic media is one of the fundamental baselines companies can look at when trying to establish strategies that will take their analytics to the next level of predictive performance. Now, as a note, programmatic media is a form of advertising in which publishing processes are automated in accordance with insights garnered through data analytics, and might end up being the most widely used form of predictive intelligence this year since it gained traction in 2014. 

Like virtually any other analytics pursuit, the current phase among users appears to be more wrapped up in the pursuit of real-time intelligence, which is no easy task in and of itself, but one that must be completed before moving into predictive capabilities. According to the news provider, 2014 was certainly a landmark in the realm of real-time analytics and, considering how quickly companies moved from the descriptive stage, this might be indicative of more rapid evolutions in the coming 12 months. 

Some players in the industry explained how businesses appear to still be bogged down in traditional strategies, despite having objectives that are far more advanced. 

"Programmatic has become the new normal, but our reporting and analytics remain stuck in the old normal," Anand Das, co-founder and chief technology officer of programmatic advertising provider PubMatic, explained, according to MediaPost. "A lot of media planning is still done in Excel. Some non-programmatic media buys still are completed through fax machines."

Again, while these matters are closely related to advertising analytics, business leaders need to be able to draw connections between these obstacles and those that more closely tie into their specific pursuits. Analytics strategies are inherently different when looking at varied objectives and functional targets, but the general gist of what needs to be done to achieve predictive capabilities is relatively consistent. 

Step-by-step
Reporting analytics technologies should be and, generally speaking, are some of the most exciting tools in the market today, as they come with the promise of reducing inefficiencies, inaccuracies and other problems more smoothly than any other solutions that have come out in the past. However, the full range of benefits will only be enjoyed when the company has taken a highly structured, patient and intelligent approach to managing these solutions and the functions they target. 

Organizations can set themselves up for success by having a relatively forward-thinking strategy in place before the solutions are even deployed in their workplaces, with objectives working on a staircase approach of sorts. This will help the firm not try to run before it can walk, subsequently leading to more dynamic and efficient use of the tools over time. Because this still is very new to the average business, going it alone is simply not the right idea. 

Consider working with a proven provider of reporting analytics solutions to get the strategic matters right ahead of deployments. 

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