Is your enterprises flooded with a deluge of data about  customers, prospects, business processes, suppliers, partners and competitors? Is data coming from traditional internal systems, cloud applications, social networking and mobile communications?

With this flood of new data comes the opportunity for business people to perform new types of analysis to gain greater insight into their business and customers.

The opportunity, however, comes with new challenges. Performing business analytics used to mean using pre-defined reports.

But now, with the flood of data and constantly-changing business environment, people don’t know what they need ahead of time, so pre-defined reports aren’t relevant. Instead, people need to make new queries based on what is happening right here, right now.  As a result, business analytics has to be “situational,” that is, it needs to respond to rapid changes in the business, economic and competitive environment.

The change in analytics means changes for IT. Traditionally, IT received detailed BI requirements and then created reports. Because this approach is not meeting the needs of discovery and situational analytics, we
need a new approach.

The answer is analytical sandboxes, a new paradigm that address the multiple-query challenges of situational business analytics and avoids the pitfalls of the makeshift data shadow systems.

For more on analytical sandboxes, including architecture design principles and options, see the white paper Analytics Best Practices: The Analytical Sandbox.