the analytics edge

You’ve invested heavily in the development of your application but your customers want more than the simple reports you have provided. They want a dashboard with some analytics that make them more comfortable that their money was well spent. It shouldn’t be complicated – just a few charts of trends and stuff like that. That’s how it starts: the journey of discovery and disappointment. You’d think this stuff was a commodity by now, but technology companies don’t like to give up their high prices, and the experts believe the complexity and specialist skill sets are required, so the products follow suit.

I was on a few sales calls this week, and this sad state of the industry was driven home by a couple of reactions to our new product offering. As with any vendor, we have tried a number of demo scripts to try to hook people’s interest, and we recently cut the demo way back to just a couple of simple activities. In each case, I was about 5 minutes into the new demo – open a transaction file, create a pie chart of sales by product, then create a table showing top 10 salespeople’s performance over the past 12 months with some colored highlighting. I refresh the dashboard and show these two reports, then pause for acknowledgement. In the first call of the week, I was surprised by a “way cool!” response. The second call was a slightly more reserved “cool!”, and I found the common response a bit amusing.

It was the third demo that has stirred up some deeper thinking, though. A large organization that sees analytics as a competitive necessity, they started by telling us that they own many different packages, from large and small vendors. They have bought analytics companies, and have built their own products from scratch. They have processes to follow, and asked for copies of any presentation materials we would be using up front. Very professional and detached, clearly setting the bar high before we started talking.

Knowing our demo script well, I apologized for what I said will appear to be a tedious demonstration of me clicking and typing, I assured them it would be short, and it was faster to show them than to explain our unique value. Working slowly through the dozen-or-so simple steps and pausing with the new dashboard reports on screen, we sat through a long silent pause. When they did speak, they apologized for the delay – they busy were taking notes, and were excited by what they just saw!

So what did these professional and experienced individuals see in our product that elicited such a response? They saw that we have significantly lowered the bar for adding analytics to applications. The discussion revolved not around the big analytic projects underway, but opportunities throughout the organization where groups couldn’t justify the effort and investment because it was so high. We joked that we create “disposable analytics” – it is so easy to add a new analysis to the dashboard that you can throw them away when they have served their purpose. It has an extremely small footprint that doesn’t try to be an application all unto itself. It is easy to use without specialist skills. And it is available at a cost that makes sense.

And it dawned on me — we have turned business analytics into a commodity, and it is long overdue.