Analytics solutions have improved significantly over the past few years, giving users across any industry and line of business better insights at critical moments of engagement.

Fortunately, analytics are now better integrated with operational systems, giving insights to a broader business audience that takes advantage of analytics in its everyday activities, so that fact-based decisions are reflected quickly in business actions.

Even recent research shows that analytics pays back more than $10 for every dollar spent – more than 1,000-percent ROI.

That said, the current economic situation puts many IT budgets under scrutiny; and your organization, like many others, might be wrestling with how to determine the most cost-effective way to achieve more impactful analytics.

There are a couple of key areas for driving the cost of analytics projects down by optimizing time and resources: minimize the challenges of integrating multiple systems and leveraging best practice use cases for your industry and line of business.

Minimizing the Challenges of Integrating Multiple Systems

It’s now well understood that user adoption is a critical success factor with analytics. If your analytics solution isn’t compelling enough to end users, they simply won’t adopt it.

A good recipe for success is therefore to assemble multiple systems for agile data integration, high-performance data management, and easy-to-use business intelligence from various best-of-breed vendors.

Of course, this approach comes at the expense of higher system integration costs. Every time one vendor upgrades, you need to look at all your other systems to ensure the whole solution still functions – not to mention end-to-end troubleshooting, which can really be a challenge with multiple customer support desks

Leveraging Best Practice Use Cases

High-performance and easy-to-use analytics built from 360° data sources is required for a successful  project.

You also need to apply the right expertise to define and deliver reports, dashboards, and use cases – specific and relevant to your industry and line of business – that will ultimately meet users’ expectations and empower them to really impact the business. Examples include how:

• Healthcare organizations optimize resources and increase patient quality

• Telecommunication marketing professionals identify customers at risk of churn and develop targeted campaigns

• Insurance companies improve claim cycle time and customer satisfaction

The collection of functional requirements from end users can be a sophisticated activity where multiple time-and-resource-consuming iterations are needed to achieve business impact.

A good example of this is Aberdeen’s research comparing the performance of organizations using prebuilt dashboard solutions to those that built their own custom dashboards.

It shows that prebuilt dashboards can be implemented in 60 percent of the time it takes to develop a custom-approach. Such dashboards can also be modified in half the time of custom dashboards.