Best practices for implementing data analytics services in your organisation
Data analytics essentially means to gain insight into your business. In practice, this involves sorting through your data to find the key information your organisation requires to make the right data-driven decisions. This process includes:
Many businesses are still early on in their data journey and therefore seek the support of data analytics services to realise their full data capabilities. This is especially true if there is a need to depart from manual processes and software such as Excel. If you, too, are looking to implement data analytics solutions in your organisation, we’ve curated a list of the best practices to follow to ensure a successful service.
Common challenges around data analytics implementation
These are some of the common obstacles we find businesses need to overcome in order to successfully implement data analytics services.?
Managing expectations and outcomes?
A lot of businesses are so keen to get to the dashboard and visualisation stage that they don’t realise this is only about 20% of the work that goes into data analytics. They also might not realise that they need to invest in the back-end platform early on.
Data quality and availability?
Ensuring that the data is available and “good data” is a common challenge. Outliers and inconsistencies in data sets can be a big issue when it comes to analysing products or source systems, which is why data cleansing is so essential.?
Data integration
When organisations take disparate data from different systems, working across them simultaneously can be very challenging. It takes a lot of resources to get the systems to work in harmony, meaning you can’t jump straight into data analysis.?
Data security?
When beginning their data analytics journey, a lot of organisations are cautious about inputting sensitive data into Power BI. This is often due to both a lack of resources within the team and concerns around data security.?
Skills gaps
Many organisations find that it is difficult to fill their BI resource. As a frequently self-taught skill, it’s tough for business owners and recruitment leaders to identify individuals who have acquired BI skills to an industry standard. This is where consulting offers a real benefit, as it provides direct access to a specialist to implement your BI function.
The right questions?
There can be a disparity between what the individual building a data report believes is important to include and what the people reading it believe. Often, asking the right questions involves a shift from interrogating past data to predicting the future. For example, instead of analysing the sales you have made in the past quarter, use your data to predict the sales you can expect to come in the next. Ensuring that the right questions are asked and stakeholders have the information they actually want is essential for the successful outcomes of the data analytics process.?
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What are the best practices for data analytics services implementation??
Start small
Before you embark on a project as substantial as implementing data analytics services in your organisation, we recommend that you first do a trial on a much smaller scale. To do this, define a clear objective on a specific dashboard to gauge the engagement and skill set of the team for the next phase. This clear indication of challenges and capabilities will also help to ensure that you get the data quality right.
Get support from the right people?
Don’t underutilise the skills that you already have in your business. Instead, strengthen your internal skill set by augmenting it with external specialists. With a Dufrain consultancy, our team works alongside our clients to provide the necessary skills and strengthen their processes. We often find that by the end of the engagement, we’ve transferred some of these skills to our clients’ teams, increasing their capabilities.?
Pick the right tools for your organisation?
It’s important to choose an analytics tool that is the right cultural fit for your organisation and the people who will be using it, as well as complementing your existing tools. Choosing the right tool is a common hurdle for many organisations, but market-leading tools like Power BI and Tableau are always reliable for data analytics services.
Monitor and iterate?
The process isn’t finished once you launch your data analytics solutions. Instead, it shifts to a sequence of monitoring and iterating based on engagement and function to ensure your data analytics services are optimised for purpose. At Dufrain, we utilise custom monitoring tools to track engagement across an organisation and based on this data, we can amend and update their data analytics solutions.
An added benefit to outsourcing your data analytics services?
With a data consultancy, as well as having access to the expertise of skilled data professionals, you can also access market-leading tools that you may not have in-house, such as Dufrain’s data dashboards . Dashboards provide the ability to start with your end question and better visualise it to identify the metrics needed to provide answers. The interactive nature of our dashboards means that your business can easily work through your data and analyse regions and sectors at a glance, for a better overall view of your real-time data.?
Our dashboards are user-friendly and customisable, so you can quickly generate graphs, charts and reports to better visualise your data and distribute them across your team. Find out more about how data dashboards can help increase your awareness of your current performance and track KPIs and metrics here .?
“Data analytics is not a race to the finish line; instead you should strive to make your data analytics future-proof. Businesses think about what they need right now, when instead they should invest in the right people and platforms early on. This will ensure longevity to meet your desired outcomes further down the line.“ Megan Livadas, Senior Consultant
Data analytics services you can trust?
As a trusted data analytics services provider , Dufrain has a proven track record of implementing solutions that drive tangible benefits for businesses at every stage of their data journey.?
Speak to Dufrain’s data analytics team about how we can help you to make smarter data-driven business decisions to drive better commercial outcomes on 0131 297 7066 or contact us here .