Applications embedded with business intelligence allow data analysts, developers and business users to drill down, access and analyze data without opening a separate tool, resulting in a more seamless analytics workflow.
“Embedded analytics reduces the amount of time users spend switching between business applications and analytics tools, which creates more time for value-added activities and improves user adoption of analytics applications,” said Travis James Fell, product manager at virtual infrastructure provider Hypori by Intelligent Waves and former U.S. Navy Reserve intelligence officer.
Fell also discovered that embedded BI helped reduce the workload on his analytics teams, which, upon developing a popular application, would typically get an uptick in ad hoc requests from business users. “Embedded self-service analytics,” Fell explained, “gives end users a faster way to obtain the insights they need while allowing analytics teams to focus on new products that help grow and differentiate the business.”
Embedded BI and analytics are also improving and speeding the workflow for analysts and engineers tasked with setting up new analytics capabilities, said Ramesh Hariharan, co-founder and CTO at consultancy LatentView Analytics. Analysts and engineers don’t need to use custom software or concern themselves with scalability and security issues when delivering insights to end users. Dashboards and other visualizations can be integrated into applications without codes or libraries.
Democratizing access to insights
Integrating dashboards as widgets into web portals or custom applications has opened up access to analytics outcomes to a wider range of users and decision-makers. According to Hariharan, LatentView created an application for a large technology company’s marketing team to help them analyze the effectiveness of multichannel campaigns. Embedded BI and analytics helped create a story by bringing multiple dashboards together and allowed users to drill down into individual segments and view other information relevant to the segment. “The insights from data is easily embedded into the daily workflows for business users,” Hariharan noted.
