Our approach to being your partner on the Data Management Journey

Authored by Buddhika Kasthuriarachchy, Head of Data Analytics at N-able Private Limited

The N-able Data Analytics team has worked on numerous successful Business Intelligence (BI) projects over the years. These projects have provided measurable value and key business benefits to our partners such as improving profitability, streamlining business processes, reducing costs and even mitigating risks: all of which that enable them to gain a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic business environment.

Organizations cannot reap the real benefits of BI by merely focusing on technologies, nor by developing dashboards or reports on a random basis. Instead, they require a phase-wise approach aligned to their business objectives, that is embedded in a holistic data management framework.

Copyright: N-able (Private) Limited. Image shows a dashboard developed for a chain of laboratory testing centers (This does not include real data)

In this article, we describe how we, as the N-able Data Analytics team, approach a BI project, illustrated by several dashboards we have developed to help our partners realize their dream of data-driven decision making.

Organizations cannot reap the real benefits of BI 
by merely focusing on technologies, nor by 
developing dashboards or reports on a random basis.

Our core principle in designing and implementing a BI project is centered on providing a competitive business advantage to our partners. We spend most part of our effort in deriving insights from data related to our partner’s business strategy, where we consider both their short-term and long-term business objectives, instead of randomly developing dashboards and visualizations.

Simply developing dashboards and visualizations from a BI tool does not add value to most organizations as they would not be able to derive actionable insights from such solutions.

Therefore, our focus is based on understanding our partner’s business requirements and combining it with our data management expertise, to provide valuable insights for them to make better business decisions.

Our Approach to BI Solutions

Most of our partners have large volumes of data, whilst Data Engineering team works on the data pipeline and the data management, the Business Intelligence team analyses the data and drives insights from them through the steps highlighted below.  

In some cases, the N-able Data Science team works on building predictive models that helps our partners to with various business requirements such demand and maintenance forecasting.

 Step 1: Acquire Knowledge on Partner’s Business

Our first step is to understand the industry and the business model of our partner. In most scenarios, we are able to leverage our expertise and knowledge from previous projects and engagements, as a basis to guide our partner on how to avert challenges and reap the maximum benefits from this engagement.

As we believe our partners are the experts of their data, we attempt to gather as much domain knowledge as possible with the business users in the organization.

Copyright: N-able (Private) Limited: A POC dashboard developed for an online retail organization.

Step 2: Analyze the Data

As the second step, we take a deep dive in to the partners data. We identify patterns, levels of data quality, and have a thorough understanding of the dataset.

During this process our team starts to think like the partner organization and understand the connection between the business processes and data. This significantly improves the value that we provide to our partners as we are able to identify the actual business requirement.

During this process our team starts to think like 
the partner organization and understand the 
connection between the business processes and data. 

Step 3: Working Towards the Business Requirement

By this stage, the BI team now has a thorough understanding of the partners data, the organization and the industry.

With this knowledge the BI team will now start working on the business requirement or objectives of the BI project which are usually discussed in initial scoping discussions.

The team then build wireframes for different segments of business users, as well as the insights they want to generate. The team will also map the useful trends and findings from steps 1 and 2.

Copyright: N-able (Private) Limited A dashboard developed for a travel company (does not include real data). 

Step 4: Build Visualizations

Once the wireframes are finalized as a proof of concept with the partner, the BI team is able to build visualizations in a quick pace. In some projects, this step takes the shortest amount of time with our expert BI engineers.

Copyright: N-able (Private) Limited: A visualization developed for a travel company (does not include real data). 

Step 5: Sharing Insights and Knowledge Transfer

The last step is to share all our findings and insights with our partner, and work together to further improve the quality of the outcomes derived out of the partner’s data.

In most of our BI solutions, we develop a semantic layer where business users have the flexibility to make any modifications or extend the solution even after the project delivery.

As we operate with the goal of our partners having full ownership of solutions we implement, the last step of the process is to empower business users to use the solution to its maximum capabilities and adjust when necessary.

Are you planning to improve your data-driven decision-making capabilities with a BI solution?  Let us help you in this important stage of your data management journey.

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