Summer is here, and you deserve a vacation. Whether you’re camping by the lake or snorkeling off the coast, you (likely) won’t be thinking about data, but this summer can still be a good opportunity to build your insights capabilities.

In this edition of the Insights Beat, we will cannonball into the business insights team’s Q2 research on business intelligence, customer analytics, and more, and discuss how you can reach insights-driven paradise.

Personalize Your Destination

A whitewater rafting trip might be perfect for the adventurous, but some would prefer a beach resort. Business intelligence (BI) also demands personalization. A one-size-fits-all approach to business intelligence has hindered adoption. BI is more than reports and dashboards — you have tools from alerts and embedded BI that proactively inform to natural language generation to help author long documents. Increase adoption and encourage more data-driven decisions by applying our seven unique BI user personas to create personalized experiences for your organization’s users.

An Activity For Every Need

The beach resort is a perfect vacation destination because it supports a variety of activities — one day you’re lounging beneath an umbrella, and the next you’re shredding waves on a boogie board. Your data platform can give you a similar breadth of capabilities. Translytical data platforms support a variety of workloads, whether that be transactional, operational, analytical, or streaming. Use our Translytical Data Platform Capabilities And Maturity Checklists to understand the core capabilities of translytical data platforms and gauge the maturity of your platform.

Have A Plan

Whether you want to sightsee, have an adventure, or relax, a great vacation has an itinerary, with some prioritization based on your situation. If you don’t have the scuba certification, you might start with snorkeling. Your customer analytics program needs that plan, too. When your team is facing disparate data, a lack of analytical acumen, or broken processes, it can be daunting to determine where to begin advancing your enterprise customer analytics functions. Our prioritized The Customer Analytics Capabilities Planning Tool identifies six discrete competencies of customer analytics maturity and will help you prioritize your projects.

Behind Every Great Vacation Is A Great Team

Every great hotel or resort has a great leader: the manager who sets a vision and ensures that the team is delivering a great guest experience. When it comes to your customer experience (CX) organization, the insights-driven CX leader is that manager. The insights-driven leader understands and applies a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to derive insights from data — customer preferences, motivations, behaviors, and sentiment — that deliver business value. See our Role Profile: Insights-Driven CX Leader to get guidance on what to look for in this key member of your CX organization.

Hotel managers don’t succeed on their own — behind the scenes is a team ensuring that the resort runs smoothly. On your data team, it’s the data engineer fulfilling this role. Whether building pipelines or supporting data architecture and data management, the data engineer provides clean, business-ready data that your team can use to address the most urgent business needs. If you are looking to hire data engineers, use our Role Profile: Data Engineer to define the responsibilities, work experience, and other requisites you should look for in your next colleague.

Follow this blog series to keep up with the latest business insights, data strategies, analytics research, and thought leadership. And enjoy your summer!

(coauthored with Research Associate Evan Megan)