Another challenge is how to get the data to move through the desired intermediate steps reliably, but if necessary, changes can be made quickly, or new data sources can be added. There are certainly many other challenges, but in practical work these require a relatively large amount of time and effort and do not in themselves add value to solving the actual business problem. After all, solving business problems is the reason why analytics actually pays off.
There have been good developments in technology in this regard. Through cloud services in particular, many of the tasks that burden IT staff are handled cost-effectively and without upfront investment, allowing new solutions to be tested on a smaller threshold. Especially for smaller companies or those that do not have an actual analytics solution, this has not been easy in the past, and projects have become heavy in terms of both cost and duration.
We have strived to find the best products in this area, as well as to build processes that make the entire solution cost-effective, reliable and flexible according to future challenges. The aim is to keep the customer actively involved in the process so that maintenance can be carried out independently, without outside help.
As one example, we have implemented analytical solutions in the field of marketing, which make it possible to make better use of e.g. data provided by social media channels and to combine it with data from companies’ other systems. In the integration, we have utilised existing services, such as Stitch Data, with which we can easily obtain data from several different services in a suitable format. Amazon Web Service S3 works excellently as a data storage platform, and we can utilise data from there via AWS Athena to Tableau.