Driving user adoption is a goal of any BI tool. Organizations benefit from their employees using BI, and ISVs embedding analytics hope that it drives user adoption so their product outshines the competition. Driving BI user adoption is critical. Consider that companies using analytics are five times faster at making decisions than their competition — that is real business agility.
There are a variety of ways to drive BI user adoption, from technical aspects to capabilities such as user experience. Matching your users’ requirements to the right BI tool is, of course, the pinnacle of driving a BI initiative. However, considering the types of users you have and how you can meet their needs is at the zenith of driving user adoption.
Understanding your users’ needs and matching it with the appropriate solution is of utmost importance. In this blog series, we will be addressing two user types: (1) business users; and (2) power users. In this first part of the series, we will be discussing how you can first meet the needs of your business users and what factors can drive user adoption for business users.
First, let’s start with a clear definition of who business users are:
Business users tend to be knowledge workers that desire to use information to facilitate a key aspect of their job. They tend to interact with the information in analytics rather than a strong need to create their own reports and dashboards.
1. High Performance
With the explosion of information in the Digital Age, it is no wonder high performance makes it to our list. I mean the average human attention span is recorded to hover around eight seconds! The fact of the matter is high performance matters because time-to-action speed can affect user adoption. Users want to analyze data and not be bogged down by slow response times.
Successful BI tools analyze copious amounts of data within seconds and scale out well depending on the volume of data. Consider the type of technologies that your BI tool may use. In-memory computation, push-down calculations and scale-out computing ensure that fast response times are a reality for your business users.
2. Data Integrity Assurance
Reporting has been around for decades and many business users are familiar with the common scenario of two or more individuals giving different metrics and numerical results to answer the same business question. Business users desire the comfort in knowing the data they are analyzing is accurate and consistent.
Ensuring your BI tool includes business-view metadata can help alleviate this problem. When properly defined, it puts the business user at ease whenever they are interpreting the information through a report or dashboard. They gain the confidence that the data they are analyzing is consistent with what every other user is analyzing or interpreting, thus allowing consistency across the organization.
3. Interactive Reports and Dashboards
Static reports only give so much information. In-depth interactivity features allow for business users to view and dig into the information from any angle and allows reports and dashboards to be truly actionable. Specfically, through interactive features such as drill-down, users can navigate data to perform root cause analysis.
Other feature sets such as conditional formatting can help business users glean the most pertinent information at a glance. Parametrization can allow for reports and dashboards to be custom tailored to the user for the most efficient and focused analyses. All of these rich interactive analytics features allow business users to find the most appropriate course of action to address issues.
There are a multitude of other factors at play that drive adoption for business users. The key component to this is convenience. This is why factors such as a high performance tool make using analytics all the more enjoyable for business users. Secondarily, the ability for business users to glean information with ease allows them to do their job in an efficient manner.
Stay tuned for part two of our series which addresses adoption for power users!
The post Driving BI User Adoption Through Empowerment: Part 1 appeared first on JReport Blog.