7 IT Challenges That Can Haunt Your Business Analytics Solutions

Do your IT challenges keep you up at night when it comes to business analytics? Are your company’s old habits from the past haunting what looks possible on the horizon? If so, you’re not alone.

IT challenges can hurt your company’s business analytics. Working with an experienced, knowledgeable IT partner can vastly improve your company’s ability to utilize business analytics tools to evolve and digitally transform. Digital transformation gives your organization a competitive edge, helping to ensure you don’t get left behind.

Read on to learn more about the possibilities available to you as an IT leader or executive business professional in the AEC space.

Understand the Goals and Benefits of Business Analytics Solutions

Business analytics solutions refer to technologies, skills, and practices that enable continuous, iterative examination of past business performance to drive business planning and gain new insights. Business analytics helps you make confident data-driven decisions informed by real-time insights, analytics forecasts, and business intelligence.

There are four stages of data or business analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. In plain terms, descriptive analytics detail the what; diagnostic analytics explain the why; predictive analytics try to anticipate what is likely to happen in the future, and prescriptive analytics suggest an ideal course of action.

The trick to successfully reaching the predictive and prescriptive stages—which seem to be where everyone wants to be—is by getting the descriptive and diagnostic stages right. However, simply doing that tends to be more challenging than it looks.

Organizational Integration Is Key to Successful Business Analytics

A lack of sufficient support for technological transformation at the management level can thwart efforts toward solidifying a more successful business analytics strategy. Why? Because unless all departments are armed with the most optimized technology for your purposes, progress is likely to be hampered.

If shifting to cloud-based technology leaves your teams mired with data they can’t organize, delete, or repurpose, it may be necessary to find different strategies to work with the cloud-based tools you have—or find new mechanisms altogether. Businesses who thought cloud technology could propel them ahead of their competition may realize they’re losing gains.

The new challenge is how to avoid losing time unnecessarily. For instance, your IT department may not have enough hours in the week to learn the latest version of a core software application because they are focused on other innovations to improve business. To prevent this setback, company stakeholders should understand the need for company-wide tool integration and the extent of potential problems.

Technological and IT challenges can hurt your company’s progress toward solidifying your executive business intelligence strategy. On top of that, the correct business analytics tools and cloud-based technology can face significant challenges in being implemented—in the AEC sector, especially.

Beyond the IT department, teams responsible for incredible innovations include the C-suite, Security, HR, and Marketing. In other words, innovation starts at the top. Influence filters down, but all parties must be on board for change to be fully and comprehensively implemented.

Recent research on strategic determinants of big data analytics in the AEC sector found that factors related to technology, organization, and environment all play a role in determining how organizations implement analytics:

• Technological context: relative advantage, complexity, and compatibility
  • Organizational context: top management support, technology readiness, and organizational data environment
  • Environmental context: pressure from competitors & trading partners

Is Your Organization Ready to Implement a Company-Wide Business Intelligence Solution

Let’s examine seven specific IT challenges that hinder a successful business analytics strategy.

1.) Infrastructure Restrictions

Are infrastructure characteristics like insufficient security recovery data centers or network server limitations hurting your business analytics capabilities? Perhaps remote geographical location or expensive on-premise software licensing requirements are causing a hold-up in real-time communication between team members?

Even if you purchase top-of-the-line software, your BI tools are useless if your servers cannot connect to the available data.

2.) Incorrect Business Intelligence Tools

Do you know how to procure and select the BI tools best suited to your organization? As suggested earlier, if your CIO wants to jump straight to predictive or prescriptive analytics before adequately understanding past organizational patterns or how to correct erroneous data, your attempts at gleaning higher-level AI-type business intelligence will be futile.

Make sure the business intelligence tools you select are the right fit for the size and goals of your company. Not all software applications or platforms are one size fits all. Ideally, you’ve determined which KPIs you’d like to measure and consulted with experts in your field who can advise you on which applications are best suited to your company’s size, geographical positioning, and industry needs.

3.) Faulty User Provisioning

What if only department heads or production floor users can access a software application, but not executive-level decision-makers? Or what if the sign-in process for a software application fails to update critical financial data in time for end-of-quarter reporting, causing an accounting nightmare several times a year?

Alternately, what if the security protocols are too lax for user provisioning, presenting a potential security hazard that opens your organization up to potential data breaches? Disaster recovery is never as simple as you might hope, and it’s best not to get to the point where the unthinkable happens. Because of this, strict user provisioning is a must for any software application your organization decides to adopt.

4.) Absent Data Visualization Tools

Sophisticated data visualization tools are the way of the future. However, many AEC firms and corporations are forced to rely on in-house data analysts to create their reports for them—or, worse yet, they have no way to visualize their data.

Our new LoadSpringANALYTICS: Automated S-Curves feature updates your BI by automating your S-curves in near-real-time. Your team’s dashboards are continually enriched with real-time data so that your dashboard does the work for you.

5.) Nonexistent Data Governance

Suppose your organization has a solid data governance policy. In that case, specific individuals, technologies, and systems help ensure that the process for accessing data securely and reliably is clearly understood. Your data should also be well-protected for your organization to have firm control over who, where, and how sensitive information is accessed.

If data is not readily available or there are security gaps, your company could become vulnerable to hackers or blockages in the workflow. Lack of data governance could put a damper on organizational efficiency and cause a loss of valuable time (and money).

6.) Delayed User Training & Education

The failure to train all departments, partners, or team members in new technology and work processes can hurt the ability of your company to execute your BI and business analytics vision.

New software tools, programs, or interfaces are good to have, but your analytics will suffer if business education and training are given short shrift due to time or budget concerns. In contrast, our cloud project controls platform offers convenience and ease of use. Via LoadSpring Academy, we provide training resources available to anyone utilizing LoadSpring.

7.) Lack of Comprehensive Integration & Support

As emphasized earlier, company-wide implementation and communication are necessary for comprehensive digital transformation. If, for example, your company invests in a new on-premise legacy software application, but there is insufficient on-site technical expertise to integrate it into everyone’s workflow successfully, that investment will likely go to waste.

It’s smarter to invest in a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) managed remotely by a separate team of experts to free up your internal IT team for on-site hardware issues and other security concerns. Because LoadSpring offers customer support as an essential part of LoadSpring’s platform, your company data will be more protected from data breaches if you opt to utilize our services.

A partner like LoadSpring can provide an integrated, comprehensive, near-real-time cloud project controls platform with the technological support you need to understand your business analytics fully.

Don’t let IT challenges keep you up at night. Skip the headache of having to do it all on your own. LoadSpring can do the heavy lifting for you: past, present, and into the future. Choose LoadSpring for better business analytics today!