Advanced Analytics Challenges
There are many different challenges businesses may encounter when using advanced analytics, including finding qualified employees with analytical skill sets, understanding how to interpret complex results, and learning how to apply insights from analyses in everyday decision-making.
While advanced analytics has a lot to offer businesses, it can be used most successfully by businesses who understand the challenges associated with managing big data analytics. Knowing these challenges is necessary so you can make allowances for it, prepare for it any way you can and ensure that the effectiveness of the techniques is not significantly impacted because of the challenges involved in applying advanced analytics.
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest challenges of advanced analytics:
Choosing the Right Data
As we know, all the advanced analytics techniques employ large volumes of data. In fact, the truth is that there is too much data available to businesses today. Choosing the right data and good quality data is key in ensuring that the advanced analytics techniques prove to be effective. A business has to decide on what data to use, where to source it from, and how to integrate it all in the most optimal fashion possible. If the wrong data is used, or sourced wrong, or not integrated properly, then the results of the techniques will not be as accurate or helpful and can actually lead to poor decision-making and costly initiatives.
Understanding What the Data Means
One of the biggest challenges with advanced analytics is that it can be difficult for business owners to understand what the data means. It takes a lot of time and expertise to develop an understanding of how all these variables interact, which makes it hard for some people to really make use of this information in their decision-making process.
Having Skilled Staff
The different advanced analytics techniques are all math-intensive, analytic-modeling tools. They require staff skilled in the latest mathematical skills, statistical methodology, and the like to be able to discover the truly hidden pieces of precious information key in helping a business get the most out of advanced analytics. It would be ideal to have data scientists on board along with additional staff skilled in the math of algorithms, AI, etc.
However, there is a real shortage of data scientists with the biggest challenge being that there is a shortage of experienced ones. A shortage of experience is not something that can be solved quickly. It means there will be a few years in which the fresh graduates will gain experience and become invaluable components of the market. Until then, businesses will have to contend with the challenge of not having experienced, skilled data scientists easily available.
Additionally, for many small to medium-sized businesses, having dedicated staff for advanced analytics might not be feasible. In these cases, they may need to invest into a service provider to help meet their business analytics needs.
Effective Application of Advanced Analytics Techniques
Businesses need to know where to apply the different advanced analytics techniques to get the most valuable results. Failure to apply techniques in the right areas will prevent the business from gaining any valuable information from the process. One way the business can ensure effective application is to have internal focus groups, use questionnaires, or bring in an external professional perspective.
Responding to the Results
There are many cases of businesses that employed advanced analytics techniques, got feedback and insights, and simply sat on it. The value and effectiveness of advanced analytics depends on the business’s ability and willingness to respond to the insights by bringing about the necessary changes in decision making, processes, strategies, etc. as recommended by the findings.
Safeguarding Privacy and Security
There are many recent instances of severe IT security and privacy breaches, which means the threat to your data, analytics insights and solutions. It is critical that you have strict security measures in place and that you incorporate cybersecurity measures into your advanced analytics solutions.
What’s more, you need to have a culture of security in your organization with an incident management process in place to address any breaches in security. Additionally, it is also important that you remember to respect the privacy of your users/customers when collecting relevant data for analysis purposes. Businesses, in the quest for the most accurate results, sometimes go too far and cross the line, offending customers or leaving them vulnerable.