With advanced analytics, non-technical business users at any level of the organization can make informed decisions within their unique sets of responsibilities. Analytics leverages Big Data represented by a wide range of data resources, then delivers insights in a capacity each user can understand. The network effect of accurate insights delivered across the organization is greater business value and an improved data culture.

Classic data models lead to “silos” of data, where different departments and teams access old or conflicting data resources. Advanced analytics creates a foundation of data resources users from across the enterprise can access individually, ensuring everyone is “speaking the same language” when it comes to their data.

Although each business user accesses data in a purpose-built capacity, shared data resources mean employees from across teams can collaborate more effectively. Senior business leaders from across departments access data separately that nonetheless coordinates during executive meetings as well. No matter the future initiative, teams have no trouble working together with the support of accurate data.

Advanced analytics can augment employees’ individual workflows for greater efficiency and accuracy in the decisions they make every day. Tools that integrate with existing software mean robust data resources are accessible without transitioning between applications. Augmenting employees’ decision making in this way means critical processes large and small add the greatest possible value, every time.

With robust and shared data resources accessible to key players across the organization, stakeholders of all types have complete visibility into the essential data driving their organization. Where senior executives with limited time may have relied on “instinct” rather than data in that past, those same executives may access insights immediately—even via a personal mobile device—improving decisions and collaboration at the highest levels of the organization.

Companies with advanced analytics are better equipped to sustain themselves during macroeconomic crises, as well as small market disruptions that might have otherwise hurt their bottom lines. That means stronger business continuity, and opportunities to build resiliency and trust among customers, company stakeholders, and employees.

With governed but democratized data access, analytics allows business users typically unaware of analytics processes to hone their understanding of analytics and collaborate more broadly with those assets in mind. Sustained access to insights from analytics supports greater data literacy as those collaborations continue.

In addition to customer, market, and other forms of external data, enterprises can leverage analytics to improve internal processes—specifically, by leveraging internal data produced by their own operations. Whether business leaders want to overhaul workforce management or optimize essential processes on a factory floor, there are applications for advanced analytics in all corners of modern organizations.