Self-Service Data Analytics and Governance for Managers

CHAPTER 1Setting the Stage

Impact

The breadth and scale of data are growing exponentially, and the growth of data is impacting the shape of organizations. In a number of industries, there are multiple departments spanning many functions who process vast numbers of data points into information for delivery to a number of internal and external stakeholders. Along with the growth of data, data analytics technology and tooling are advancing at a break-neck rate to process it, to understand trends, and even to make predictions on future outcomes, before displaying results neatly in low-latency dashboard views for ultimate consumption by managers, executives, clients, counterparties, and regulators. Increasingly, data analytics and automation tools are available to perform more of the routinized tasks in the data-to-information processing chain than ever before. Digital transformation features in the concerns of most Fortune 500 CEOs, and while companies report that their top goal regarding their digital transformation is to understand their customers better or to improve products or services, in practice, there are more practical motivations for digital transformation in finance, accounting, and operations functions. The goals are to build capacity and create efficiencies through automating routinized processes, improve process stability and control by structuring the work done outside core systems, and to optimize human capital resources by reducing low-value-added processing tasks. ...