The Mainstreaming of Analytics Puts A New Emphasis on Usability

The mainstreaming of business analytics was inevitable. Once the realm of data scientists, analytics are increasingly being leveraged throughout the enterprise to deliver valuable business insight. In fact, one of the biggest trends over the past few years has been integrating and even embedding analytics with other enterprise applications, such as CRM, ERP, back office applications and even the supply chain.

Analytics applications are delivering richer business insight across the enterprise, yet as they become more pervasive, they need to be highly accessible to a much broader set of business users. Well beyond the IT staff, today we see the customer service team, human resources and even marketing taking advantage of analytics to better understand their programs, make better decisions and justify budgets. This is putting a significant new emphasis on usability.

The latest Value Matrix for Business Analytics (H1 2015 – https://bit.ly/1DedurJ) from Nucleus Research shows the usability race clearly, as vendors add more intuitive user interfaces and make features easier to use. In fact, many are leveraging the cloud to provide solutions that are more complex under the hood, but easier to maneuver for the regular business user.

Birst, for example, prioritized usability and showed a significant jump in the Value Matrix. IBM also put strong emphasis on usability, further extending its lead. And GoodData, Information Builders and Yellowfin also improved their standings in the Value Matrix fueled by improvements in usability.

Of course usability is but one front in the highly competitive analytics space. Vendors also face difficult choices between developing operational analytics or focusing on predictive features that provide cognitive intelligence. Plus there is added pressure to verticalize solutions, as several vendors are experiencing great success with applications for specific markets, especially healthcare and pharmaceuticals. And yet, with all these choices, Nucleus predicts that usability will continue to be the driving trend that separates the wheat from the chaff.