Analyst Perspectives

In today’s organization, the myriad of analytics and permutations of dashboards challenge workers’ ability to take contextual actions efficiently. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom for investing in analytics does not recognize the benefits of empowering the workforce to understand the situation, examine options and work together to make the best possible decision.

Since its inception, HCM software has upended how people interact with their workplace. Paper resumes have given way to online applications. Physical time clocks have largely disappeared in favor of apps or clocks housed within a point-of-sale system. Even benefits enrollment has entered the digital age, adding tools like decision-support modeling to help enrollees determine which of the myriad...

The management of work is a focal point for every organization that has people and resources directed to accomplish the smallest to largest of tasks. But many organizations are not easily able to manage complex activities because the details of how people are assigned and complete work are not as simple as they should be. Traditional project management methods and technologies have failed to work...

Organizations conduct data analysis in many ways. The process can include multiple spreadsheets, applications, desktop tools, disparate data systems, data warehouses and analytics solutions. This creates difficulties for management to provide and maintain updated information across multiple departments. Our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research shows that organizations face a variety of...

Workiva offers an environmental, social and governance application that enables organizations to manage the highly distributed tasks necessary for reporting to regulators and stakeholders on ESG matters. ESG issues have grown increasingly pressing over the past few years as investors and government entities urge organizations to measure and disclose relevant metrics. I’ve already covered the...

For far too long, business intelligence technologies have left the rest of the exercise to the reader. Many of these tools do an excellent job providing information in an interactive way that lets organizations dive into the data and learn a lot about what has happened across all aspects of the business. More recently, many of these tools have added augmented intelligence capabilities that help...

The shift from on-premises server infrastructure to cloud-based and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models has had a profound impact on the data and analytics architecture of many organizations in recent years. More than one-half of participants (59%) in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark research are deploying data and analytics workloads in the cloud, and a further 30% plan to do so....

Analytics processes are all about how organizations use data to create metrics that help manage and improve operations. Yet, the discipline applied to analytics processes seems to be lacking compared to data processes. I’ve pointed out that the weak link in data governance is often analytics. Organizations can also do a better job tying AnalyticOps to DataOps and do more to define and manage...

There is always space for innovation in the data platforms sector, and new vendors continue to emerge at regular intervals with new approaches designed to serve specialist data storage and processing requirements. Factors including performance, reliability, security and scalability provide a focal point for new vendors to differentiate from established vendors, especially for the most demanding...

Ventana Research uses the term “data pantry” to describe a method of data storage (and the technology and process blueprint for its construction) created for a specific set of users and use cases in business-focused software. It’s a pantry because all the data one needs is readily available and easily accessible, with labels that are immediately recognized and understood by the users of the...

In previous perspectives in this series, I’ve discussed some of the realities of cloud computing including costs, hybrid and multi-cloud configurations and business continuity. This perspective examines the realities of security and regulatory concerns associated with cloud computing. These issues are often cited by our research participants as reasons they are not embracing the cloud. To be...

In the face of a very uncertain future, companies have been discovering the value of rapid planning and budgeting cycles. As events unfold, they’re changing expectations for the future significantly on a daily or weekly basis. However, even when the world returns to a steadier state, companies will benefit from making their planning and budgeting processes faster, easier, more relevant, more...

Recently, I suggested you need to “mind the gap” between data and analytics. This perspective addresses another gap — the gap in skills between business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).

After decades of overpromising and underdelivering, technology has now evolved to the point where it is fundamentally changing how accountants work – for the better. The pandemic and resulting support of remote work set the stage for a transformation of how accounting efforts are structured and performed, all for the better. Remote audits that became routine during lockdowns are evolving into...

The market and buyer landscape for contact center operating services has changed significantly since the onset of the pandemic, now almost three years ago. Three years would have been enough time for some significant shifts, even without the pressure the pandemic put on service operations. Nevertheless, with on-premises systems now taking a backseat industrywide, it’s fair to say that CCaaS,...

The technology industry has established itself as a pivotal force in its ability to help organizations become more intelligent and automated. But doing so has required a journey of epic proportions for most organizations that have had to endure a transition of competencies and skills that was, in many places, transitioned to consulting firms who were hired appropriately to manage changes....

Earlier this year, I wrote about the increasing importance of data observability, an emerging product category that takes advantage of machine learning (ML) and Data Operations (DataOps) to automate the monitoring of data used for analytics projects to ensure its quality and lineage. Monitoring the quality and lineage of data is nothing new. Manual tools exist to ensure that it is complete, valid...

Emburse offers a single platform that enables organizations — small, midsize and larger —to manage their travel and related expenses, pay invoices and handle their corporate spend. Today, technology has the ability to significantly increase the efficiency with which organizations handle expenditures while simultaneously containing costs, increasing controls and improving visibility into where the...

One of the most significant considerations when choosing an analytic data platform is performance. As organizations compete to benefit most from being data-driven, the lower the time to insight the better. As data practitioners have learnt over time, however, lowering time to insight is about more than just high-performance queries. There are opportunities to improve time to insight throughout...

Embedded business intelligence (BI) continues to transform the business landscape, enabling organizations to quickly interpret data and convert it into actionable insights. It allows organizations to extract information in real time and answer wide-ranging business questions. Embedding analytics helps tackle the issue of extracting information from data which is a time-consuming process. Our...

Managing corporate income taxes is a challenge for chief financial officers and their tax department professionals. Tax codes are often complex, so tax accounting as well as the data required for tax provisions and tax compliance are different enough from statutory accounting to create significant workloads for the tax department. The provision for income tax expense and, for public companies,...

Organizations are increasingly utilizing cloud object storage as the foundation for analytic initiatives. There are multiple advantages to this approach, not least of which is enabling organizations to keep higher volumes of data relatively inexpensively, increasing the amount of data queried in analytics initiatives. I assert that by 2024, 6 in ten organizations will use cloud-based technology...