In its most recent report on insights-driven businesses, Forrester found that those with advanced business intelligence infrastructure are confidently growing by at least 20%. These are organizations that have been successfully enabling smarter and faster decision-making across the board through technology and data governance.
By LANSA, An Idera Company
Intelligent use of data analytics is key to optimized business processes, high customer satisfaction rates, and increased profits. With the ability to closely monitor performance and trends, companies are able to respond faster to the market – even make reliable forecasts and ultimately gain a competitive advantage.
Being able to process big data and serve up reports to key decision-makers make a good start, but it’s enabling self-service business intelligence that truly powers an insights-driven business. The question then becomes: How to democratize access to data and bring intelligence to the point of decision-making?
Democratizing access to data: the three stages
Democratization means empowering all stakeholders — employees, managers, and executives alike, even third parties in certain cases — to leverage real-time data in generating insights for taking calculated next steps in day-to-day work, especially when planning and problem-solving. Let's break that down into three stages:
1. Data consolidation
Bringing together data from various sources is critical in forming comprehensive views and cross-variable analyses that would be the baseline of reliable business intelligence. A centralized repository of data including but not limited to financial, customer, sales, and supply records is foundational to good governance. From here, querying and tabulating otherwise disparate data become possible. However, where coding is required and data is far too granular, non-analysts would have a hard time making practical use of this data. Meaning, adoption for day-to-day decision-making is still near impossible at this stage.
2. Data presentation
Leveraging analytics platforms that deliver real-time data in the form of charts, graphs, and infographics is one giant step toward democratization. Visualizations help stakeholders make meaning out of data, facilitate comparisons, and interpret trends. With data already aggregated and then graphically presented in dashboards, it becomes easier for non-analysts to generate insights independently to inform their actions and decisions. In instituting an insights-driven business, these dashboards should be made available not just to executives but also to members on the ground to facilitate smooth and optimized operations.
3. Data integration
Here, data integration means bringing analytics into the very applications that power your business to extend insights to day-to-day work. Instead of offering data in a separate platform, integrated business intelligence removes the barrier between action and insights generation wherein analytics blends seamlessly into work. Business intelligence is no longer a separate dimension that often alienates end-users but an element that empowers them to course through work more efficiently and effectively. Embedded analytics harnesses the full potential of data democratization by allowing everyone to impact overarching organizational goals instead of keeping insights exclusive to select stakeholders.
Delivering advanced analytics to businesses running on IBM i / AS400
It is important to recognize the integral role developers play in building an insights-driven business. From consolidation, presentation, and integration, developers are at the center of implementing the right technologies to truly democratize data. For businesses running on IBM i / AS400, reporting is still typically done manually or with outdated tools at best, hindering the transformative use of data and analytics.
Nowadays, developers turn to low-code platforms to be able to quickly respond to rapidly evolving business needs. It provides developers with ready-made frameworks to deliver advanced applications and out-of-the-box solutions for incorporating new technologies. However, many low-code platforms lack robust reporting modules. They may have slick drag-and-drop functionality to turn data into charts, but sophisticated features that truly deliver business intelligence are found to be lacking.
Introducing LANSA BI, from the pioneers in professional low-code development on IBM i / AS400
For more than three decades now, LANSA has been helping businesses modernize their IBM i / AS400 applications. By offering developers a professional low-code solution, it enables the rapid development of well-integrated, mission-critical applications at the time of digital transformation.
This year, LANSA is rolling out a BI solution that doesn’t just supplement the creation of beautiful dashboards but makes insight discovery far faster through embedded analytics and more. For LANSA, truly modernized applications made for competitive businesses should be leveraging data and analytics. While LANSA has cross-platform capabilities, its native integration with IBM i / AS400 makes it an asset for developers looking to implement self-service analytics to help cultivate an insights-driven workplace.
LANSA BI will offer core features such as best-in-class dashboarding and reporting complete with intricate drill-down and filtering capabilities that don’t sacrifice data integrity. Supported innovations also include Natural Language Queries (NLQ), collaborative presentations, and interactive stories – many of which will be made available as both stand-alone modules or deeply embedded widgets that can be accessed contextually within existing or new LANSA applications.
Bridging the gap between theory and development with the right tools
Understanding what it means to bring intelligence to the point of decision-making and the whys of doing so is a fundamental milestone in developing organizational best practices for sustainable growth in today’s market. To succeed, it is important to equip developers with tools that can significantly accelerate their work and boost their productivity.
Modernize the way you handle reports and maximize data to gain that competitive advantage. Say goodbye to manual reporting and facilitate insights generation within your organization using LANSA BI. Learn more at lansa.com/business-intelligence and reach out to
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