Chapter 1. Delivering Embedded Analytics in Modern Applications

Organizations in all industries are rapidly consuming more data than ever, faster than ever—and need it in forms that are easy to visualize and interact with. Ideally, these can be seamlessly embedded into the applications and business processes that employees are using in their everyday activities so they can make more effective data-driven decisions, instead of decisions based on intuition and guesses. Research indicates that data-driven employees and organizations outcompete and are more successful than those that are not data-driven. In keeping with these trends, business leaders increasingly require their vendors and IT organizations to embed analytics in business applications. With embedded analytics, organizations leverage vendors’ domain expertise to provide analytics guidance for the application users.

The trade press has recently focused on helping businesses become “data-driven organizations.” As the result of a study, the Harvard Business Review bluntly announced, “The more companies characterized themselves as data-driven, the better they performed on objective measures of financial and operational results” and “The evidence is clear: data-driven decisions tend to be better decisions.” The article follows up with specific examples. Infoworld stresses speed, automation of data collection, and independent thinking among staff. The barriers to becoming data-driven are the focus of a recent Forbes article ...

Get Delivering Embedded Analytics in Modern Applications now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.