How To Determine If Managed Analytics as a Service (MAaaS) Is Right For Your Organization

ICYMI → Read the previous post in this series: "Why Businesses Are Opting For Managed Analytics Services (MAaaS) in 2021"

When is the right time in your data & analytics journey to move to a Managed Analytics Service? Is there even a right time?

To many, an organization's data is its lifeblood. Knowledge of this data is key to an organization's ability to compete and succeed. Can an organization outsource such a critical part of its decision-making process?

The answer is a resounding yes, and there are a number of factors that will indicate whether your organization should consider making the switch.

But it is critical that organizations first ask certain questions within the context of their own operations to determine if Managed Analytics is right for them. To determine if it is sensible to outsource this type of work, organizations should start by asking themselves the following:

• "Are any of our efforts surrounding data repetitive in nature or can be considered a commodity activity?"

It's important to know that the effort to procure and process data is often the same across multiple use cases. In this context, it is likely that some of this work can be deemed a commodity activity and therefore can be outsourced to a Managed Analytics Service.

• "Are we investing a lot of time into gathering, organizing, and analyzing important data?"

If it feels like the answer is yes, it's important not just to address this problem, but also to acknowledge that other areas of the business are likely suffering as a result.

If just five employees spent one hour less daily on gathering, organizing, and analyzing data, the organization gains back a collective 120 hours of valuable time on a weekly basis. Over the spread of a single year, and between even more employees, the hours wasted on work that could be easily outsourced rises comfortably into the thousands.

Fortunately, Managed Analytics Services are typically up-to-date on best practices on how to quickly gather data, turn it in contextual information, and make that information easily accessible and searchable. A Managed Analytics Service should also be able to provide advanced analysis capabilities for analysts.

By providing a mix of technology and expertise, Managed Analytics Services can streamline and rapidly speed up the process of gathering and organizing data, returning countless hours of valuable time that can be better spent on move-the-needle projects.

• "Are we finding it difficult to make use of the data that we collect - much less turn it into actionable, impactful insight?"

The most impactful insights are often generated from patterns and relationships that naturally exist within a company's data. However, these patterns and relationships will be largely hidden from view if the bulk of a company's data is not connected or linked.

If there is no real transparency into how different areas and data within the business interrelate, it's incredibly difficult to recognize the kinds of patterns and relationships that can drive a business forward.

An effective Managed Analytics Service will implement some form of Graph technology in order to ensure data is correctly linked together. Without Graph technology, bringing data together in a way that provides context to the data and clearly shows patterns and relationships is incredibly difficult.

It takes a skilled team to set up graph technology that can work quickly and effectively for your business. Make sure your Managed Analytics Service doesn't just bring graph technology to the table, but can also demonstrate exactly how it's going to fit the nature of your business and start providing value - fast.

So what exactly should organizations keep in-house?

What organizations need to keep in-house is not so much how to store and transform data, but rather the deep understanding of business objectives and what success looks like to the organization with those objectives completed. Given that information, Managed Analytics Services can help create and support data models that will provide those metrics.

Businesses should consider reorganizing their internal teams to focus on defining business outcomes vs. outputs. Teams should understand what accompanying metrics can help drive desired outcomes and understand where the data lies that can support those outcomes. This will allow Managed Analytics Services to do the rest of the "dull" work.

This initial focus on metrics is essential, as outsourcing data and analytics should not come without a strategy. If even defining a strategy is a problem for your organization, see if your Managed Analytics Service can help. NOTE: The most effective strategies provided by managed analytics services should add capability WITHOUT adding layers of additional complexity.

If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, or if you need help storing and transforming your data, a next step would be to continue reading about Process Tempo's Managed Analytics Option and see if it's a fit for you. Learn more about the Process Tempo Managed Analytics Service below, and stay tuned for our upcoming post: "7 Common Challenges of Fielding Internal Analytics Teams".

Managed Analytics as a Service (MAaaS) from Process Tempo is an analytics solution that helps your entire team make intelligent and profitable decisions by leveraging your data - and all without a heavy, upfront investment. By choosing an efficient, fast, and cost-effective path to insights, we can help you beat your competitors in today’s data-driven, competitive digital economy. By adopting MAaaS, stakeholders can focus on achieving sustainable and predictable profitable growth.

Ready to get started with Managed Analytics? Read more about Process Tempo's Approach to Managed Analytics or schedule an introductory session. Process Tempo is a hybrid cloud, data management & analytics platform that breaks down silos to allow people, processes, and technologies to seamlessly work together. The platform supports a secure, governed, scalable, and high-performance environment for analysts and data scientists while serving as the foundation to deliver insights to all employees. It helps to deliver markedly fast, actionable, and accurate insights, easily incorporates a semantic data layer to curate and recommend information from across the organization, and makes every employee a first-class citizen in contributing insights and feedback to make the organization smarter over time.

Learn more about the platform here.