Turning the 80/20 rule to your advantage with cloud-native data visualization

Focusing your attention on what creates the most impact seems an obvious approach in business. But sometimes, we’re unaware of how we spend our time and could be wasting hours or even days on tasks that don’t move the needle.

How your organization works with data has the potential to change everything – if you’re making the most of your input, versus your output.

What is the 80/20 rule?

The 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, was developed by Italian philosopher and engineer, Vilfredo Pareto, and speaks to the imbalance between the effort we put into something versus the output.

In business, this rule has formed the basis for many common maxims, like: 20% of sales reps generate 80% of sales totals; or 20% of the most reported bugs cause 80% of crashes, (per Forbes).

And while figures like this might seem a little daunting, these types of suboptimal situations can actually become incredible opportunities for your business. Applied in the field of analytics, Harvard Business Review states that the Pareto Principle has the potential to “digitally drive profitable innovation to levels beyond conventional analytics.” You just need to work with data in a way that keeps the insights flowing.

How to spend more time on what matters

It’s not uncommon for developers to only spend 20% of their time doing actual business analysis and the remaining time getting the data ready for analysis. That means that a majority of their time is spent getting data out of silos, cleansing it, and organizing it into digestible data stories, before ever analyzing it and drawing meaningful conclusions.

Clearly, this isn’t sustainable, especially with the mounting pressure to deliver insights at record speeds. And Traditional Business Intelligence solutions – ones that take a day or two to deliver insights – set business back days (even weeks) behind competitors.

Another factor that can railroad peoples’ priorities is the continued reliance on technical data teams for insights. Business users may feel more comfortable getting insights from a BI Developer rather than diving into the data themselves. But you can turn these data consumers into independent data creators, by providing your organization with an intuitive data analytics solution. This will save time for both the business user and the technical analyst.

To respond to unexpected changes or trends in the market, your team needs to answer questions and get insights quickly. Shifting from tools that use the traditional Extract, Transform, Load, Transform (ETLT) process, to modern solutions in the cloud, not only saves time, it’s a transition that enables users to spend time on what matters most.

A modern approach to BI

Modern teams need modern analytics solutions. With cloud-based analytics, you flip the traditional BI process on its head. When your data is centralized on a cloud data platform, rather than walled-off in various departments, you give everyone access to real-time insights. So there’s no more need to create endless dashboards and reports in silos to meet individual business needs.

So how do you use cloud analytics to work more strategically? We recommend an approach that starts with identifying strategic priorities and then repeating the process (in the image below) with continually improving efficiency. A snowball effect.

Cloud-native data visualization with Astrato

Astrato is a data analytics and visualization platform built for the cloud! With super-fast load times (no longer minutes, hours, or even days, but rather milliseconds), you can analyze and visualize data instantly. Get real-time insights that harness the 80/20 rule to your advantage.

You can also streamline your insight journey with embedded analytics. Embed live insights into your everyday business apps (like HubSpot, Confluence or SharePoint) with Astrato Embeds. No more hopping between different apps because you can take your Snowflake insights anywhere!

 

Cloud-native solutions can build everyone’s confidence to use data and support business-wide data literacy. Help your team make the best use of their time with Astrato.

Now try Astrato’s cloud-powered data visualization for yourself.

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