Analysis tools are increasingly used in business not only to show performance results, but senior management or team development, leadership, headhunting, process optimization, recruiting, or any other change or transformation in general, as they are able to provide significant plus factors such as transparency, comprehensibility and practicability. Hence, expect for this trend to continue to grow in the future.

In fact, experts started to realize already a long time ago that analysis tools are receiving a lot of interest from businesses, since they are useful for decision makers to explain why they made their choices or came to the conclusion in the first place. Besides, sometimes it is simply no longer possible to uncover causes, let alone to initiate the necessary steps, as our world has become too complex. Those who work with customers usually only deal with certain aspects of a larger whole. However, to represent or to understand the big picture, tools are so urgently needed.

Interestingly, the call for certain minimum requirements comes mainly from the clients themselves, who want to be able to relate and understand  the analysis and implementation on the one hand; on the other hand they want to know of course what they can do with the results in practice. This explains why companies demand tools that simplify processes and clearly work out what to do. In addition, it is also more likely to win the entire workforce over that way, because only those who also understand what needs to be done, in what way and above all why, can make an important contribution to the success of a project.

Once several tools are used together for an evaluation to get the big picture, it is important to look for possible interfaces that bring more results together and provide an overall view. What’s always important here is making sure that the client understands the processes and knows the next steps needed to initiate and implement them in practice.

Recruitment companies, for instance, have historically had a difficult time mining their own candidate databases and have relied on third-party sources to find talent for their clients. They usually collected data on millions of candidates over the years, but could not pocket the full benefit of that effort, because applicant tracking systems have not kept pace with the latest in search and match technology.

Modern search engines, however, understand more than just keywords by now - they understand the meaning behind the search. This means, they are able to rank results intelligently in order to present the best possible candidates to recruiters, due to state-of-the-art semantic solutions. Now, candidate shortlists can be automatically created and matched to a position without any data entry and initiate automated next-step actions. Further, matches can be automatically optimized over time by learning from feedback that users are generating when they invite or reject candidates for interviews, industry experts affirm.

As always, the aim is to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of an organization in order to be able to deal with it properly. By creating more robust and meaningful insights with analysis tools, the optimum market positioning gets easier, not to mention faster, and more targeted responses can be delivered. Analytics simply provide the fuel for an organization to make better and faster decisions.

Organizations that manage to use data as a strategic tool that fuels digital interactions and re-invents business processes for the modern world, will differentiate themselves based on their ability to adapt, survive and thrive as the pace of society continues to accelerate. Companies that embrace analysis tools are contributing to transparency and comprehensibility while realizing and experiencing the big picture.

By Daniela La Marca