Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

It is evident that business analytics is now a core business process in most organizations, but as our benchmark research on the topic shows, many have a lot of room to improve in how they use it. A dedicated provider of analytics tools, eThority continues to advance its technology to supply flexibility for the needs of a range of professionals from business management to analysts. 

The company recently announced release of version 5 which adds new interactivity and visualization. One of the advancements in the interactivity is its improvement to electric Graph business charting, which can dynamically present detailed charts as users drill into a chart. This was one of the most often requested capabilities by users in our business analytics benchmark research. Just as important are the formatting and presentation of analytics, that eThority 5 addresses with its palettes that are a lot simpler than Microsoft Excel. In addition the new version provides the ability to apply comments for collaboration and sharing in what is like applying paper sticky notes to the analytics. These interactive and collaborative features also are part of what business people want from analytics software. 

Another noteworthy advance comes in the dashboards and scorecards called Dash that are constructed in its analytic and application assembly environment. This method of analytic information assembly enables users to bring together briefing books and applications. Through the use of a simple catalog you can apply existing analytics representing measures, metrics or key indicators in any type of tabular, report, chart or alert format. Version 5’s PowerFields can apply a variety of analytics such as expression, margins, tabulation, ranking or substitution to the data. The new version has advanced filtering that can bring together more complex selections of data based on values – an attribute-based query method not found in many tools today. All of this business data-related analytic metadata can be stored as part of defined views that can be used in creating applications or dashboards. 

The product is easily navigated from a simple overview screen that has a folder and library approach to the analytics and applications. In addition the new version has a search bar that can help users find specific analytics quickly and allows them to apply keywords to those analytics. To make eThority easier to use across a department and the enterprise, there are new methods for saving analytics to users, groups, departments or across the organization and even add identification for tagging them more directly. 

I have written about eThority’s effort (See: “DataTalent Is the New Player in Workforce Analytics”) to break into the workforce analytics market that we recently researched.  The company’s independent efforts in this segment can help HR organizations that struggle to construct and use a basic to sophisticated set of metrics on the workforce since their data is scattered across HRMS and talent management systems. Once the metrics are managed in a central environment then more advanced key indicators ranging from people, process, performance, risk and others can be built to be part of the insight required for managing a workforce effectively but also the entire organization. 

Overall eThority has taken steps to simplify the usability and functionality of business analytics so those in business can manage and use them. Based on its built-in data integration and a range of platform and tool advancements, I expect eThority to find new opportunity. I am looking forward to seeing how eThority moves to support mobile technologies in smartphones and tablets that are becoming widely used in business. With an established foothold in the university system and now in the human resources, along with a long track record over the last 15 years, it has a market in which to capitalize on this new version. 

Regards, 

Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer