Tal Ball is CEO of Symphony Metreo

Have you thought about how you can better serve your business analyst recently? A relatively generic term, “business analysts” are those within a company in charge of making sense of information to support decisions in business processes. Their business titles can range from “pricing analysts” to “supply chain planners” to “cost accountants.” They often serve as the glue between departments, such as operations and planning, to consolidate data and provide analysis that is useful to both departments. However, new benchmark research from Ventana Research entitled, “Decision-Making and Performance,” has found that while business analysts are responsibly focused on aligning actions and decisions to outcomes (89 percent of them), most are spending the majority of their time reviewing data for quality and consistency (79 percent), rather than focusing on forward-looking business analysis. Across the executives and managers in operations, finance and other lines of business surveyed in the Ventana benchmark research, only 36 percent are confident in their company’s analysis and planning.

The root of the distrust in analysis and planning amongst key decision-makers lies in the inability of departments to properly work together to share data. Poor communication is considered the top barrier to effective business analysis by executives and managers, while a lack of shared visibility and long turn-around time are close seconds. With each functional department often communicating in a silo with its own error-prone spreadsheets and other presentations for reporting, it is often difficult and time-consuming for a business analyst to easily consolidate all of this data into meaningful information that can be easily shared. Heavy use of spreadsheets is undeniable – 84 percent in the Ventana survey said that at least someone in their department was a heavy user of spreadsheets, while 48 percent of participants admitted to finding major errors in their spreadsheets frequently. With an application so institutionalized, yet so error-prone, business analysts are put in a tough situation when it comes to consolidating data across so many different spreadsheets.

There exists a great challenge to business analysts to provide real time decision-making capabilities across departments, but where does IT’s role exist in facilitating this process? IT serves business analysts in a variety of roles, but primarily provides data feeds and reports for their use. However, many business analysts today lack robust technology capabilities and consider their most demanding challenges to be creating metrics and KPIs (identified by 57 percent), presenting data effectively (56 percent) and collaborating on data and metrics (49 percent) – all of which are particularly difficult to achieve when the primary tools used are spreadsheets.

There is an opportunity for IT to find and support the deployment of information systems and analytics that can operate across the enterprise and eliminate silos of spreadsheets and presentations. While budgetary nervousness can often be cited as a concern by management for investing in such technology, the mere fact that business analysts are spending more time on collecting and verifying data than creating analysis itself (their actual job purpose) provides a clear case for time savings and efficiency.

It is important to note, however, that while there is a need to provide business analysts with robust technology, not all technology geared towards analysts is suited to provide transparency of both data and the decision processes connected with the data. For example, many analysis and reporting tools serve to support a specific business issue in a specific department versus offering a forward looking and cross-departmental view.

Integrated Business Planning solutions, which serve

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