The products of Enkatahave generally been designed for what Ventana Research terms performance management for customer service and call centers, including applications connected to agent performance management (quality monitoring, coaching, training and related analytics) and operational performance analytics based on transactional, structured data. Recently Enkata has taken a new direction with its branding (“changing the customer experience”) and has been filling out its portfolio of products to include analytics for unstructured data, so it now includes speech (courtesy of a partnership with Callminer), desktop, cross-channel and text analytics; the last supports  the analysis of customer surveys and social media posts.

With this broad range of analytics capabilities Enkata can capture data from almost any source and provide integrated analytics that draws on all of them. It has used these capabilities to widen its portfolio of prebuilt business applications, such as first-contact resolution, next-contact avoidance and contact reasoning (about why customers are calling). At the heart of many of these developments has been a partnership with Openspan, which has what I call a smart desktop product. It allows organizations to hide the complexity of their desktop systems behind a simpler user interface, extract and deliver data to applications without the user having to know the full interface, and post messages onto the desktop to aid users with the task in hand. This partnership allows Enkata to capture what users do at their desktops, analyze how they use systems, combine this information with insights derived from its other analytics applications and enable actions based on these combined insights. Those actions can include posting a message to the desktop, for example, to remind the user to ask a particular question, giving the user context-based information, such as product information to help a cross-sale or using the newly enhanced workflow engine to send a message to a third party to take action.

These types of capabilities enable the products to close the performance loop by analyzing what is happening, deciding what needs to be done and enabling the necessary actions. This is particularly true for customer experience management, where knowing what has happened is not enough; organizations need to take action so that customers finish the interactions feeling they have been treated well. This also applies to back-office functions such as claims processing, where the system can guide the user in following best practices. The software also helps with workforce optimization, because as the system analyzes how different users complete a task, it can help identify best practices, which can be enforced by changing the user interface and prompts, and by helping focus training.

In addition to developing these new capabilities and partnerships, Enkata has made two other changes that address two key areas Ventana Research has identified. Its products are available in the cloud, reflecting the increasing acceptance of this supply model. And it has moved into the big-data arena to support organizations that have growing volumes of data but still want results in seconds. Follow my colleague David Menninger if you want to learn more about this area of growing importance and check out his latest Big Data benchmark research.

Customer experience management is one of the most important issues organizations need to address to retain customers and sell them more business. My experience and research show that this is not easy, because it requires combining numerous types of analytics and the capabilities to take action, often in real time, for example during a call. The latest developments from Enkata seem to back up its claim to support the customer journey by enhancing the customer experience, so I recommend organizations see how Enkata can address this key business issue. Enkata has advanced significantly since my last analysis And worth taking a closer look.

Are you addressing the customer experience? If so, how? Please tell us your views and experience and collaborate with me.

Regards, 

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director 

Business analytics and big data are common topics of conversation in the business and information technology markets, but these technologies are only building blocks to help businesses manage performance. Entering the conversation is Actuate, which for years has had a performance management division that provides software for managing progress toward objectives through a variety of analytic and action-focused techniques. The company has announced release of a promising new generation of its enterprise software, Actuate BIRT Performance Analytics. 

Using its longstanding business intelligence (BI) technology based on the open source BIRT, Actuate packaged an offering called ActuateOne that I assessed over a year ago. ActuateOne helped the company retrofit the core of its software for performance management by embedding and building on top of the underlying analytics and BI functionality. This is a good step forward, as our business analytics benchmark research found that only 15 percent of organizations are innovative in using business analytics. Such companies can access, collect and review performance based on analytics and metrics faster, better and more cost-effectively than others.

Now Actuate has shifted its attention from performance management to performance analytics, which helps broaden the relevance of its offering. The software goes well beyond traditional dashboards to provide the ability to assess gaps toward goals and direct action. Actuate has not gotten enough credit for depth in the analytics and discovery elements of its software for optimizing and managing performance. In this release it is clearer how it can cover the basics and get organizations to focus on supporting actions that require commentary and review cycles. Actuate has improved the ability to make observations and notation directly on the analytic information from within the software, eliminating the need to attach comments from a Word document or electronic mail.  

One of the key capabilities Actuate shares with other vendors of software designed for managing performance through analytics is to easily collect the data necessary for integrating with the performance indicators. For example, to examine key customer indicators on satisfaction, you might have a summary number of customer complaints by region and month to be used in a calculation. These types of data points can come from customer feedback management (CFM) software and reports, but the process of integrating them with your analytics data model can be cumbersome, and it might not even be necessary to assess the impact of complaints on customer satisfaction. Our benchmark research in business analytics found that collecting data is hard for 51 percent of organizations and inhibits them in getting full value from analytics. Actuate has been expanding its software portfolio to support more customer-related information, which my colleague Richard Snow has assessed. It can now demonstrate how it helps organizations focus on their customers, which many desperately need to do.

Of course speed is critical for businesses in building key indicators from measures and metrics. Results must be recalculated as the underlying data and measures change daily or weekly. By using Actuate BIRT, organizations can use 64-bit in-memory processing for query, reporting, analysis and publishing of their performance analytics. This also helps organizations do what-if scenario planning, and they can access the metrics and analytics using Microsoft Excel as a front end to their application-specific information.

ActuateOne can help organizations focus more on the application level and less on the underlying analytics and BI infrastructure. Indeed, our business analytics research found that organizations dealing with analytics spend 69 percent of their time on data-related activities compared to analytic ones, partly because their analytic and BI technology  has trouble directly accessing and integrating data. 

Actuate makes its offering available via the cloud computing model. You can sign up and rent the software, then configure and load data, eliminating the need for IT cycles to tailor the in-house hardware and computing environment for the software. The trend toward using cloud computing to rent and access software continues to grow; our business analytics research found that 27 percent of organizations now prefer this approach.

Actuate BIRT Performance Analytics provides a foundation to choose and integrate pre-existing key indicators. It has more than 12,000 measures to select from including business and financial, operational and customer-centric ones. If you are trying to manage goals, objectives, activities, initiatives and business processes, the Actuate approach gives you a method for reaching the outcome you desire.  

Actuate’s visual capabilities make it easy for managers to review performance-related analytics,  including briefing books that organize collections of reviews not just in pages but also subpages. This approach eliminates the laborious process of creating presentation decks and sending them around for review. Such presentations are static and inevitably out of date by the time the real decisions must be made. Actuate’s key indicator visualizations, which come from its roots in delivering balanced scorecards, are some of the best to engage business people’s attention and complement the traditional pie and bar charts to represent the relevant impact of its performance. And the product still has strategy maps and methodical scorecards. 

Actuate has an opportunity to spread performance management to a much broader audience. The new software may help customers see the limitations of analytics that allow you to understand but not optimize and align performance. Actuate’s approach to the full management cycle is an example of what my colleague Robert Kugel calls action-oriented information technology systems. It can help mitigate risk in business through risk analytics. Beyond risk, to get full value from Actuate BIRT Performance Analytics, organizations should not just focus on key performance indicators but also track people, process, customer and other types of analytic-generated metrics and indicators that focus on causes and conditions rather than just outcomes. 

If Actuate wants to take its technology to the next level and get more management interest, it should make its Performance Analytics accessible on tablets like Apple iPad, as that is the perfect platform to allow management to check on business and operational performance anywhere at any time. While Actuate has mobile capabilities today, running natively on smartphones and tablets and allowing users to review most of the analytics, the unique visualization style of Performance Analytics has not been engineered to work on Apple’s proprietary technology framework.  

With the new release of BIRT Performance Analytics, Actuate makes performance management simpler to get up and running and to use. Its refreshed marketing to address its product’s capabilities was needed. Actuate now can educate businesses about why taking action on analytics can make a difference in business. 

Ventana Research has spent a decade insisting that performance management be treated as a key business process with unique needs and significant benefits to organizations. Assessing and adopting dedicated applications designed for a particular business process helps reduce costs, time and risk and gain the outcomes sought. In the context of our analytics research finding that only 41 percent of organizations are satisfied with and one-third are looking to make changes in their approach in 2012, Actuate has an opportunity to advance its market position. 

Regards, 

Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer 

The stakes have never been higher for suppliers of interactive business intelligence. Our benchmark research on business analytics finds that businesses overwhelmingly (89% of participants) want simpler analytics and metrics, and usability (57%) and functionality (47%) are the two most important evaluation criteria according to our Value Index vendor and product assessment methodology. In addition our business analytics research, 38 percent said that accessing analytics and metrics via mobile technology is important or very important.  

I have been evaluating business intelligence tools that run on smartphones and tablets for many years to determine how well vendors are meeting the needs of business. In the case of Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile on the Apple iPad and iPhone, I was not overwhelmed by the implementation. In fact, I found significant challenges in configuration, usability and functionality that make the software less effective than it should be. Oracle BI on Apple mobile technologies compares poorly with other products in the delivery of comprehensive and usable BI on mobile technologies, including those my colleague and I already have assessed from Actuate, IBM, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Qlikview, Roambi and Yellowfin. Let me tell you about my experience.

I attempted to assess Oracle BI on the iPhone and iPad last year, but the company did not have a freely available demonstration available from the Apple App Store. I decided to try again when I saw a tweet that announced free access to the latest Oracle BI on mobile platforms. From the application information on the download page I discovered that the software was published last May, so it isn’t brand-new. While you can download the software, you cannot access the instructions to actual use it; I had to find separate instructions posted by Oracle. The configuration requires a two-pass setup where you must register with Oracle to get user authentication and access to database-level configuration for the demonstration database. I got to the instructions, but after sending a follow-up tweet that I could not get the application to work, I got a reply from Oracle sending me the URL of a specific instruction sheet. Once I reviewed the instructions and got through the detailed configuration screens, I was able to set up Oracle BI on my iPad and iPhone. 

This was definitely not a simple process, especially compared to that of most other BI vendors, who simply provide an integrated demonstration database for use when you download the application, eliminating configuration. This approach has been the standard set by hundreds if not thousands of demo applications available over the last several years, and it makes sense since software vendors want people to see that accessing their mobile technology is simple and the user experience is enjoyable. Somebody at Oracle might want to try out its competitors’ applications to see how easily this can work.  

Oracle provides one example demonstration called Brand Analysis that has multiple dashboards. Using this, I found that the application fails to take advantage of standard iOS features. For instance, it is not doing initial autosizing to fit the screen or when you zoom into an analytic view, and standard hand gestures that you would typically use on an Apple device are not available. I expect any business intelligence application to support basic interactive user needs, from drill, pivot and page to sort, filter and rank selections. Oracle BI does some of these, but it’s not intuitive about when you can drill down or if you are just zooming into a chart or table, and if you want to pivot, it’s not clear whether that is possible. Paging through data is simple enough, but any level of sort, filter and ranking is impossible unless you go into the full product and build the output, which then can be accessed by the mobile tool. You should be able to easily save views, make notations and share your findings, but you can’t, except for emailing the URL you are looking at to someone else. 

I do like elements of the geographic views on the data, but after any interactions the application is slow to respond and refresh, which is surprising, since most metrics and analytics could have been pre-calculated to make the demonstration fast and easy. Our business analytics research finds that search and navigation are the top two requested needs of business users, but Oracle has failed to support these operations as simply as it could. 

To be sure I did not miss anything, I went back and watched a promotional video and did additional research on the Oracle website. I even Googled around to see if other functionality that does not come naturally is included in the product. I did find some specific interactions for drilling down and prompting action which I worked through. However, it is not clear that the Oracle developers have spent much time personally using Apple devices, or they would see how difficult their app is to use and conclude that it is not positioned to compete against others in the market. If there is any advantage to using Oracle BI on Apple mobile devices, compared to other vendors’ software, it is not clear to me since you want it to be easy and simple to use. 

If Oracle wants to get significant adoption and get on the short list of vendors who provide valuable analytics and business intelligence on mobile technologies, it had better get a better approach real fast. It must also determine how to deliver incremental updates every quarter; treating mobile platforms like Apple’s with the pace of traditional enterprise software releases and updates every year or so will fail. If you are an Oracle customer, you will have to upgrade to its 11.1.1.5 release as it does not support previous releases, and if you are not a customer, then you will have to determine if you have resources to install and configure in IT. I would have hoped that it would offer a version in a cloud computing method to quick start customers, but could not find that this was available anywhere. Oracle competitors have a significant number of public customer references, and could not find any significant ones for Oracle who needs to take steps to energize its mobile BI efforts to stay relevant. 

Regards, 

Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer