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Reports are generally used to confirm a prior decision or to provide support for an upcoming decision. What we really need is both confirmation on previous decisions and help making future decisions, which we currently use reports to accomplish. As analytics approaches real time, reporting will be too slow of a method for assisting in decision making. So what would future innovations look like?
Confirmation on decisions
All work starts off as tasks. Tasks can be correlated to onsite impact. Future systems will be able to map our tasks to impact and provide a conclusion on the activity. Some of those conclusions will be used by site optimization engines to make adjustments on the fly without need for humans to read and decide on reports. Some of the data will make it into quarterly board meetings and reviews with agencies and consultants.
Assisted decision making
While there are some unique scenarios, much of what happens online in marketing fits into patterns. In the not too distant future, we’ll see systems that use these patterns in a library to provide a dashboard of recommended actions. We will be able to complete simple actions with the push of a confirmation button. Other actions will be as easy to complete as clicking through a link. All of those actions will be tracked automagically for confirmation on the decision.
What do you think the future of reporting looks like for real time analytics?
Agreed – the next real-time revolution is to be able to analyze in real-time on real-time data, in order to make real-time decisions.
Example: you run AdWords campaigns and you have spent weeks planning the campaigns, keywords, etc. You want to track the performance of your campaigns real-time, so that you can constantly adjust your budget. You may also run e-mail marketing campaigns, and all these activities may generate leads in your Salesforce.com database, revenue in your ERP system, etc.
The same goes for your sales activities, your web site performance, your projects, your service department, your call center, your production, etc. Everything happens real-time and you are spending your money and resources real-time – but there is no way for you to track or monitor it real-time.
Each of your systems (AdWords, salesforce, e-mail marketing, etc.) give you silo views of your data, but not the unified view across your channels/business.
You can try to import all the data from your different systems into a spreadsheet, but then the data is disconnected/obsolete, and spreadsheets can't handle decent amounts of data.
Or your can turn to on-demand BI. Unfortunately, existing analytics/Business Intelligence offerings all work this way:
1. Export the data from your systems, e.g. from AdWords and Salesforce.com, and upload it to some data warehouse
3. Set up the data warehouse to mash and map data from the different data sources
4. Run your analysis on the data
By the time you run your analysis, your data is obsolete – you cannot make decisions real-time.
At youcalc.com we aim to solve this dilemma. Youcalc connect live/real-time to the original data sources, retrieve the data real-time and analyze the data real-time.
It’s a bit like hooking up your spreadsheet with live data sources on the net, and then analyzing the data-stream as it keeps flowing in.
Youcalc lets you connect to any number of data sources simultaneously, including AdWords, Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, etc. Mash up all the data real-time, into one unified analytical view across your business – then you make your real-time decisions.
http://www.youcalc.com
Approaches? VisiStat has been real-time since it's inception 4+ years ago….It's absolutely a live streaming feed. http://www.visistat.com
It's kind of funny that I post about real-time just before I left for a 4 day vacation. Sorry for the slow replys!
Rasmus, you really hit the nail on the head "…the next real-time revolution is to be able to analyze in real-time on real-time data, in order to make real-time decisions."
To me, this is where we need innovation. Having real-time data is arriving, as Tina Bean points out with their Visistat offering. I like what you're saying about dashboards. I was just watching the Metricly presentation from TC50. In addition to integrated data, we need assistance in real-time decision making. Real time reports, even integrated across business applications, just exacerbates the pain point of real time decision making.
Your vision is great, but we need to be able to crawl before we can walk.
For automated/assisted decision making to be possible, their must be an analytical foundation that aggregates the relevant data, analyzes it, possibly even data mines it.
On top op that, you can then build "decision making dashboards" and setup events and workflow triggers (possibly using some business process management/automation system).
Services like Metricly are nice features, but it is pure aggregation and visualization, there is no analytics layer, so data is not enriched. Aggregating a lot of data and then visualizing it will certainly "exacerbate the pain points ..". Analyzing data before you visualize it will take away some of that pain.
Considering the state of current analytics, I think this "not to distant future" that you describe is probably pretty distant – unfortunately!