The winds of change are blowing in the political world and seem to be constant in the Analytics tool space. But change is not easy on the end users. Some, of course, will be happy, and others will not. It’s how we manage that change and who we empower as positive agents of change or change agents.
The analytics world has had many transitions. We’ve had the wave 1 journey with the Enterprise BI tools (IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, SAP Business Objects), the wave 2 craze with self-service for the individual or departmental (Tableau, Qlik, Power BI) and then the wave 3+ with the AI craze (Watson Analytics, ThoughtSpot, Beyond Core). The funny part is we say transition when most companies simply added tools to the mix vs replacing them entirely. Honestly, transition is hard not only for the content being moved tool to tool (which is usually a loss of productivity and money) but also for the users.
Humans are creatures of habit. Some are more patterned than others. Me, if I’ve been to a restaurant more than once I am likely ordering the same thing every time, or when eating, I’m a system eater. I’ll eat what I dislike the most and finish with what I enjoy…maybe I’m just nuts. It’s no different with content or analytics; we go back to the place we frequent most.
So why is this an issue? Well, when we introduce a new tool, site or location, it means those new places are not the primary place we think of, so we waste time. Again, not a big deal if we are talking about two analytics tools / sites / URLs…but we know that anyone who has been doing analytics for a while now has 4 or more locations (as stated by Forrester) and we at Digital Hive say it is even more than that! Our poor users can’t remember all these things and a project to remove tools and move content is simply a waste of time. From our experience, we know that this is a key factor in analytics adoption which has been stagnant.
Executing the peaceful transition (our users and our tools).
By implementing Digital Hive, we can give our users a single place for all our analytics content as well as the assets that analytics live in, like PDFs, PowerPoint…etc. from our file systems or cloud storage like SharePoint (offline and online). Yes, this still means a change for users, but it’s one location for everything analytics rather than multiple.
With the users never having to worry about where the analytics are, we can now use Digital Hive’s unified dashboard capabilities to assemble the desired content for targeted groups of users. This allows us to take pieces from various BI tools and lay them out together for an easier view of a business vs a copy and paste of charts into PowerPoint or the like. Then, when the time comes when we move a certain analytics project from one tool to another (e.g., Tableau to PowerBI) then we can simply swap out the assets…even one at a time! Now, users are no longer impacted by teams trying to get to the latest technology stacks, changing or removing BI tools, or even newer versions of BI tools.
(The above is a before and after; the same chart information is for the bottom left, but different vendors!)
Digital Hive’s pure and modern Analytics Catalog and Unified dashboarding capabilities help analytics teams stay agile and keep users happy while increasing adoption.