The Cure for Analytics Overload

Do you know how much time you spend trying to find meaning in your metrics? What if there was a better way?

You sit down at your desk in the morning, coffee in hand, ready to get to work. You start your day with a dashboard, checking on how things are going. Actually you check a few dashboards, since one dashboard can’t capture the entirety of your business. And a few spreadsheets. You look at them — and then you do a lot of thinking. You ask yourself, does this metric look right? You compare it against what you think it should look like, and how you think it looked last year. Didn’t you run a new marketing campaign last week? Surely that should have moved the numbers. You stress about what is going on and who to ask about it.

Does that sound familiar? If so you’re not alone. In fact, your experience is the same as most business leaders today.

You have dozens of different software tools you use and each produces myriad number of metrics, any of which could indicate a problem or opportunity at any time. Some of these dashboards are spreadsheets, some of them are charts, but all of them require study to extract value. The amount of time wasted in trying to derive insights from numbers is astounding. If you start your day by browsing through 4–5 dashboards and another few hours in a dashboard-driving status/planning meeting, you are spending around 6 hours per week just checking metrics. That’s 15% of your entire week, just trying to figure out what is going on! Over the course of a year that adds up to over 300 hours, or almost two months of your time.

There is a better way. Machine learning is unlocking a new form of business intelligence known as business analysis automation. Instead of starting your day sorting through dashboards, spreadsheets and numbers, you can have all of the important business insights you need delivered into your inbox in a single update. After spending five minutes reading your update, you will know everything you need to improve your business that day.

Imagine how that will accelerate your business. Instead of trying to figure out which marketing campaigns are working or not, you’ll know immediately where you should invest more or pull back. If your customer behavior changes, you won’t have to try and figure out why, you’ll know the causes and effects in real time. Instead of waiting for your revenue to drop and trying to figure out why, you’ll know as soon as an emerging revenue problem develops and act to head it off before it becomes a crisis.

You might think this technology is still years away, but this world has arrived and companies are already leveraging automated analysis today. Software applications like Outlier are saving companies both time and money by freeing them from the burden of trying to extract insights from data. Instead, they are using those insights to drive better business decisions in a fraction of the time.

Are you ready to see automated analysis save you 6 hours per week? Let us know.