Building an Insights Ecosystem: Part 3. Business Analysis

Integration Experience Design for a More Accessible Actional Insights Ecosystem

In today's competitive marketplace, enterprises are under constant pressure to improve profitability and business efficiency. Armed with meaningful insights, business leaders can make better-informed decisions, take actions to boost performance, and grow their bottom lines. But few are able to do this. In order to derive the untapped value of data and insights, enterprises need to fully interconnect business, technology, and stakeholders within an Actionable Insights Ecosystem (AIE). AIE provides the cross-matrix capabilities needed for all-inclusive operational intelligence and insights-driven decision-making.

In part one and part two of our panel discussion series, we covered the foundation, or Enterprise Data Platform (EDP), and human-centric components, or experience design (XD), required to build a comprehensive Actionable Insights Ecosystem.

Now we consider how enterprises can ensure that their insights ecosystem addresses the right needs while being technically viable, as well as financially and functionally reasonable.

That’s where business analysis (BA) comes into play. Deployed correctly, BA can be used to evaluate processes, identify requirements, and deliver both data-driven recommendations and reports to empower executives and other stakeholders.

Business analysis is key to defining business metrics and KPIs, and for identifying ways to refine existing business processes and systems. BA works in close engagement with IT, business leaders, designers, and end users to understand how possible data-driven changes can add value and optimize current operations, services, or software.

To delve into the role of business analysis for actionable insights, we spoke with Ioanna Pona and Dmytro Zubets — BA experts for data-driven solutions at SoftServe.

So, with regards to Actionable Insights Ecosystems, what is the role of business analysis and why is it important?

DZ: The main idea of an Actionable Insights Ecosystem (AIE) is to deliver the right insights to the right people, at the right time. So, the AIE with its fundamental component EDP is a solution or a toolset that can solve business problems and bring new value by realizing business opportunities. This is where the role of business analysis is crucial.

BA works with the customer’s business needs and converts them into potential business use cases where AIE can be applied. But it is not enough to just reveal and specify the potential business use cases. The next step is to justify and demonstrate the business value of using AIE: what are the costs and benefits, what is the ROI, and so on.

You mentioned that BA works with clients to frame potential business use cases where AIE can be applied. Can you give us an example?

IP: For sure! Say that a manufacturing company’s goal is to reduce energy consumption and the enterprise is accordingly pulling data from its industrial internet of things (IIoT) and facilities automation, its ERP system, and the weather. An Actionable Insights Ecosystem holistically collates that data to provide operational insights that enable long-term decisions and drive down consumption. BA is essential in pinpointing the business value within the data.

We know that unlocking data value is key to becoming a data-driven company, which is commonly thought of as a purely technical concept. But it sounds like business analysis plays a more practical crucial role to SoftServe’s AIE clients?

DZ: Yes, Business Analysis is a key aspect during the discovery, design, and implementation phases. We're responsible for defining scope, eliciting and specifying requirements, and managing backlog during the implementation.

BA brings industry, trend, and marketing knowledge to the team and ensures that the AIE covers actual customer business needs.

IP: At SoftServe, such business needs have been as diverse as identifying new ways to use and monetize legacy data sets, implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to recommend products with more precision than with conventional algorithms. It can also build systems to profile vendor performance using complex metrics beyond simple cost analysis.

So, BA serves as something of a liaison between our clients and the multiple SoftServe teams who deliver AIE. That is, it ensures projects align from the start and then stay on track, moving upwards from data as a foundation to advanced technology integration and even insights-driven experiences and management decision-making.

IP: Absolutely. The principal impact benefit of BA working effectively in AIE development is to align and orchestrate the insights with strategic business value, otherwise we are only creating nice dashboards.

Business Analysis serves as the bridge between business demands and technology. Great BA encompasses both the insights and the ecosystem.

Want to learn more about the Actionable Insights Ecosystem?

Dig deeper in our series of articles:

Building An Insights Ecosystem: Part 1. Enterprise Data Platform

Building An Insights Ecosystem: Part 2. Experience Design

Building An Insights Ecosystem: Part 4. AI And ML

Are you delivering the right insights to the right people, at the right times? Do your analytics capabilities meet the needs of business, technical, and external stakeholders?

Contact us to find out how evidence-based analysis and AIE can provide insights that benefit all stakeholders through data democratization.