Why Analytics Team as a Service for BI Initiatives? 6 Pain Points ATaaS Solves

A non-optimized business intelligence effort perpetuates the problem it is meant to correct.

Business intelligence initiatives are not an end unto themselves – they exist to align the resources and budgets of an organization toward its goals. However, optimization may be an elusive goal for many organizations – because optimization requires unique skillsets and a broad perspective.

It is difficult to build excellence for an entire organization on a shaky foundation – an analytics effort with questionable ROI. The longer this problem persists, the worse the problem becomes. Business intelligence initiatives, which may have once delivered focus and goal alignment, can themselves become part of the problem. Inaccurate KPIs result – leading to distrust of metrics and lack of clarity. Meanwhile, data and BI costs can balloon, and turnover at key positions may exacerbate the problem.

In light of these challenges, we have developed an Analytics Team as a Service (ATaaS) offering to address key pain points for clients in a value-conscious but robust manner.

ATaaS provides our clients with a team of Graphable experts – each deeply skilled, but with various skill sets – to bring the right expert to the specific client need.

The ATaaS offering allows for planned BI budgeting with the ability to throttle the personnel allocation component – for example, the first year of an analytics platform implementation may require 2 full time employees (FTEs), but years 2 through 5 may only require half of an FTE to maintain and grow the initiative.

Here are 6 of the pain points we’ve experienced alongside clients that the ATaaS offering has been specifically designed to address:

1. Strategy – Questionable ROI on BI initiatives

Many BI initiatives do not have a demonstrable ROI to validate the resources poured into them. When the costs of the BI platform, personnel costs, the extended cost of implementing and maintaining that platform, implementing governance and the costs of storing and processing data are taken into account, do they provide the organization demonstrable ROI?

Further, some organizations have aging BI initiatives. While the initial BI implementation may have been robust and in full alignment in terms of cost and budget, over time, because of changing processes, accumulating data, champion departure and/or a multitude of other factors, it is no longer optimized as it once was. Graphable has found that BI initiatives require purposeful maintenance to retain their focus and value to the organization.

Graphable’s ATaaS works with companies to align all of their costs and efforts with one goal in mind – optimization – so that the resources allocated to the BI initiative achieve maximum positive impact for the organization. For our ATaaS clients, this commitment is demonstrated in an initial audit, with subsequent quarterly business reviews (QBR), in which BI spend is reported and analyzed for efficiency, bringing both rigor and rhythm to the BI effort. These efforts are key to regaining and maintaining optimization.

2. Personnel – lack of cross-domain experience

We’ve also experienced a dearth of business alignment in the BI space. Let’s be fair – there are many people who know how to manipulate data and get to an answer – but how many of them know how to connect it to the “Why?” How many of them understand the needs of the finance department, the operations department, and the marketing department all at once, and how all of those KPIs matter to executives as they roll up through the organization? To be honest, many analytics professionals have a hyper-focus on technology but do not or cannot consistently focus on the “Why” behind the key organizational KPIs.

Graphable’s ATaaS team hires analytics consultants from a variety of backgrounds who gain deep experience implementing and optimizing business intelligence initiatives across an entire organization. Simultaneously, the entire team has been intentionally formed with areas of specific specialty that they can bring to bear at the right time for any client. Graphable’s team has worked with over 300 clients in various verticals over the past 6 years, building deep experience in the sector.

3. Ballooning costs – maintaining ROI in a changing environment

Data costs are changing as I write – it can be tough for companies to keep up – leading to rapidly growing costs. The shift to cloud offerings (SaaS Analytics) and the changing cost structures of analytics tools (i.e. many providers are shifting to consumption models), along with the certain increase of stored data over time makes it imperative for organizations to optimize their data architecture and governance.

It is vitally important to the optimization of a BI effort to account for the growing costs of data and understand the impact of a data architecture to the bottom line. For example, is it necessary to copy all of your data into a BI SaaS platform? Can it remain in its native storage, and the Analytics platform extract what is needed without copying multiple datasets? Is Snowflake or Databricks the right place for my data? If a copy of the data is needed, how many datasets are needed? Can datasets be optimized so that the amount of data is kept to a minimum and ETL used to extract data to present data effectively to the visualization layer?

Graphable’s ATaaS team has an eye for optimizing the data stack for value and long-term cost planning – and has a wide variety of experience and well-positioned partners to ensure organizations continue to align spend to ROI in the midst of change. Graphable partners with Domo, Databricks, and other offerings to optimize client data architecture. Check out Sarah’s blog on best practices when it comes to optimizing Domo’s consumption model pricing.

4. Strategy – lack of holistic approach

Graphable has noticed that often BI efforts are siloed within an organization. This puts the cost center of the BI effort on one department or division of the organization, and the ROI can be hard to return to that cost center. Simultaneously, the data sources can go beyond the boundaries of that department.

Graphable’s ATaaS team helps to drive towards a more holistic approach to BI – optimally with the costs shared across the organization, with a broad approach to architecture, governance, and dataset design. A holistic perspective can have a massive impact on the ROI of the entire initiative, because data duplication and redundant effort can be significantly reduced with a holistic data strategy.

5. Personnel – turnover of team members

Graphable has worked with many organizations to train a BI individual or team. Training clients’ employees is an effort our team has always enjoyed and also excelled at – but we have seen many of those newly trained team members depart the organization at some of our clients within only a year or two of hire. An organization that has budget for 1-3 team members on a BI team is vulnerable to the turnover and limitations of those employees. It can also be limited to the skill sets that those team members have.

We have seen well-conceived and promising BI initiatives struggle to remain relevant after a key analytics team member (champion) departs the organization, taking along with them many months of training and organizational knowledge.

Graphable ATaaS is provided via team construct and helps to mitigate the challenges presented by team member turnover due to our robust documentation and alignment strategies.

6. Strategy – square peg, round hole

Graphable has often experienced a misalignment between what analytics platforms offer as opposed to what their client really needs. Take for instance, finance analytics. Often a vendor will want to showcase slick software features – but everyone knows deep down that the finance department will always use Excel to some degree – so why do we continue to pretend like that will somehow change?

Graphable’s ATaaS has a laser focus on value – NOT primarily on making a specific tool the ONLY tool an organization uses. This means that we will work to provide the right tool or process in the holistic BI effort, not try to change what the client’s employees do well if it does not make sense. Analytics, well implemented and optimized, will amplify the excellent work of a client’s team members, not force them to change processes unnecessarily. Check out David Zimny’s unique take on business intelligence and accounting analytics.

Through our Analytics Team as a Service (ATaaS) offering, Graphable has compelling answers to these very common business intelligence challenges. Since 2018, our experienced team has supported over 300 clients to optimize the initiatives of our clients in surfacing value from their data.