The Benefits and Challenges of Personal Analytics

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. The Challenge of Democratizing BI: Finding Relevant Information
  3. The Challenges of Adding Context to Content
  4. Use Cases
  5. Blending Data, Content, and Context into Actionable Knowledge
  6. Assessing Products and Services for Personal Analytics
  7. Key Takeaways
  8. About David Loshin

1. Summary

Presenting business analytics attuned to individual needs is often difficult, but deployed properly it can deliver results that inform decision-making fully aligned with corporate strategy. Doing so requires conquering the challenges associated with adding context to content.

A clear distinction should be made between personalization and personal analytics. Personalization means crafting the presentation of material to meet individual expectations. Personal analytics, meanwhile, is filtering and organizing content relevant to each individual’s scenarios and then leveraging that person’s preferred methods of accessing and absorbing information to streamline the business and decision-making processes.

The report will help CIOs, CTOs, line of business managers, and other IT decision makers understand the importance of blending data, content, and context, and will give them guidelines for assessing tools for personal analytics.

Key highlights in this report include:

  • Flagship consumer apps have increased expectations and created a need and opportunity for enterprise software to deliver personalized experiences inside traditional applications and workflows.
  • When all individuals in areas of expertise use the same search engines, search strings, and industry journals, they’ll derive the same intelligence about what is happening in the business, industry, and market.
  • Personalization, an assumed part of the technology user experience, is key in solving the problem of data relevance.
  • The ability to transform numerous data sources into personalized intelligence feeds involves methodology that is likely to tax most IT shops.
  • Engaging external vendors to augment internal business intelligence with personal analytics is a way to decrease time-to-value.

 

Image courtesy of baloon111/iStock.

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