SAP announced enhance­ments to SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, includ­ing aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics, new lev­els of Busi­ness Intel­li­gence (BI), enter­prise plan­ning work­flows, and data inte­gra­tion capabilities.

No doubt this is good news, but we need to ask some ques­tions. First, why did SAP list aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics as the first addi­tion­al super­pow­er? How does aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics dove­tail with the oth­er ele­ments of the SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud tool set? And, most impor­tant, what is aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics anyway?

What Are Aug­ment­ed Analytics?

Tech­nol­o­gy ana­lyst Gart­ner defines aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics as an approach that ​“auto­mates insights” using machine learn­ing and nat­ur­al lan­guage gen­er­a­tion. But that still doesn’t tell us much.

In terms of real-world actions (they’re actu­al­ly vir­tu­al cloud-based actions, but you get the point), an aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics sys­tem will per­form tasks for us that it knows we need to make hap­pen. For exam­ple, it could take on tasks such as auto­mat­ed data prepa­ra­tion, so that data is dedu­pli­cat­ed or per­haps re-parsed to send it hurtling into the ana­lyt­ics engine.

The Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Advantage

Nat­ur­al lan­guage intel­li­gence means that users can ask ques­tions of their data in nat­ur­al lan­guage. When SAP says users can ​“ask,” this still refers to typed text rather than spo­ken, but they can phrase these ques­tions in a con­ver­sa­tion­al way. For exam­ple: ​“How do I sell more wid­gets in region x?” Or per­haps: ​“What sec­tion of my stock is most out of date?”

Once it works on infor­ma­tion and finds results, aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics doesn’t just sit on it, it per­forms ​“insight shar­ing.” As Gart­ner puts it, ​“Aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics will enable expert data sci­en­tists to focus on spe­cial­ized prob­lems and on embed­ding enter­prise-grade mod­els into appli­ca­tions. Users will spend less time explor­ing data and more time act­ing on the most rel­e­vant insights with less bias than is the case with man­u­al approaches.”

Data Lit­er­a­cy and Responsibility

As with all things in life, with great pow­er comes great respon­si­bil­i­ty. In this case, there is a greater respon­si­bil­i­ty for indi­vid­ual work­ers to under­stand and inter­pret the infor­ma­tion that comes from these ana­lyt­ics. ASUG mem­bers look­ing to chan­nel new aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics func­tions into pre-exist­ing work roles will need to assess each user’s cur­rent lev­el of data lit­er­a­cy and, where nec­es­sary, train staff to take advan­tage of these new infor­ma­tion streams.

A car with an auto­mat­ic trans­mis­sion still needs some­one to steer it. Like­wise, aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics is essen­tial­ly an auto­mat­ed func­tion, but data-lit­er­ate humans still need to weigh in on and man­age the process.

Machine Intel­li­gence + Human Cre­ativ­i­ty = Bet­ter Insights

“The com­bi­na­tion of machine intel­li­gence and human cre­ativ­i­ty is where ana­lyt­ics is at its best,” said Ger­rit Kaz­maier, senior vice pres­i­dent, SAP Ana­lyt­ics. ​“With SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, our focus is con­tin­u­ous inno­va­tion in a uni­fied solu­tion that is intu­itive, pow­er­ful, and designed for the busi­ness user. We con­tin­ue to pro­vide our cus­tomers with an end-to-end data and ana­lyt­ics approach enabling con­fi­dent, data-dri­ven deci­sions and intel­li­gent process­es that pow­er bet­ter busi­ness outcomes.”

Kaz­maier answers the ques­tion of how expand­ed aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics func­tions will dove­tail with the oth­er ele­ments of the SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud tool set. It’s a uni­fied solu­tion, so all these func­tions will exist as part of a user’s nat­ur­al expe­ri­ence when using the SAP Ana­lyt­ics Hub.

The SAP Ana­lyt­ics Hub is the route to aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics in the SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. It offers a sin­gle point of access for all ana­lyt­ics con­tent, whether those ana­lyt­ics come from SAP tech­nolo­gies or non-SAP sources.

Big Busi­ness Intel­li­gence (BBI)

ASUG mem­bers look­ing at their BI tools might now think of them as big­ger and more pow­er­ful. SAP isn’t call­ing this Big Busi­ness Intel­li­gence (BBI), but it’s an acronym that could stick if users adopt it as wide­ly as SAP hopes.

What makes BI big­ger? Users can now add new machine learn­ing (ML) and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) capa­bil­i­ties to exist­ing BI and plan­ning work­flows. Accord­ing to SAP, ​“With the smart pre­dict capa­bil­i­ty, busi­ness ana­lysts can train mod­els to pre­dict future out­comes. Enhance­ments include time series mod­els and user expe­ri­ence improve­ments that make it eas­i­er for ana­lysts to pre­dict future out­comes and auto­mate decisions.”

Bet­ter Busi­ness Plans

With enhanced live con­nec­tiv­i­ty to the embed­ded mod­els of the SAP Busi­ness Plan­ning and Con­sol­i­da­tion appli­ca­tion, users can ampli­fy their exist­ing invest­ments and con­nect com­plex plan­ning process­es in the cloud.

These new capa­bil­i­ties allow end users to cre­ate and adjust their busi­ness plans with­in SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud and oth­er tools, includ­ing Microsoft Excel. SAP says that this will mean orga­ni­za­tions can extend and align plans in finance and across the enter­prise to make the best end-to-end plan for the business.

A Wider Data Pipe

SAP is open­ing more data chan­nels, 100 new data sources, and more types of data ana­lyt­ics. At the risk of throw­ing anoth­er anal­o­gy into the mix, this is a wider, faster-flow­ing, and longer data pipe than ever.

Ana­lyt­ics are smart, but aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics can auto­mate the insights we need to know to run our orga­ni­za­tions. Going fur­ther, aug­ment­ed ana­lyt­ics is smart enough to find unex­pect­ed val­ues in com­plex data pat­terns that we may not have on our radar. Smart just got even smarter — and that means we can all raise our game.

If you’re look­ing to learn how your peers are doing more with busi­ness intel­li­gence and ana­lyt­ics, you should join us at the BI+Analytics Con­fer­ence in Atlanta, Geor­gia, March 9 – 11.