This content is relevant only if you are a CIO (or IT decision maker). Here is the video of the session I conducted at CIO Power List event on 4th May, 2018, at Conrad, Pune. Shadow Analytics has been around ever since “shadows” – also called end users – are around. Everyone knows about. Some people tried to eliminate it. Nobody succeeded.
This 30 minute video explains how to use Shadow Analytics as an opportunity to empower rather than restrict users and improve effective utilization of data.
Contents
Demos Included
The demos included in this Shadow Analytics video are:
Flash Fill, Insights, Explain the increase and Q&A.
What is Shadow Analytics?
It is all kinds of data capture, clean-up, manipulation and report generation performed by end users without IT intervention.
If you generate a report from a business system (which is built or managed by IT), it is alright. But if you copy paste data from multiple such reports into Excel and then generate a new report, it becomes “Shadow Analytics”.
As you can imagine, it is difficult to eliminate it. Irrespective of how much time and effort you have spent on creating the most flexible ad-hoc reporting systems, it is impossible to provide every possible variation that users want. Therefore, Shadow Analytics has always been there and is likely to survive in the foreseeable future.
Problems associated with Shadow Analytics
Primarily two problems. It is extremely error prone and time consuming. There are lots of related problems. The root cause is that data is handled in a casual manner without regard for its recency and in a completely undocumented manner.
This can lead to wrong decisions, delayed decisions, increased operational risk and enormous wastage of precious time.
Summary
It is impossible to handle and correct the data sources and deliver data to users in a manner which is so easy that they stop doing the manual capture and clean-up altogether.
Once clean, accurate and updated data is available as input, creating reports can be done by end users in a more informed and productive manner.
