Analytical Pathway Methodology: Simplifying Business Intelligence Consulting

The implementation and use of advanced analytics to identify patterns and discover the non-obvious from structured and unstructured data sources to improve business performance or establish a competitive advantage is becoming more commonplace in enterprises. Delivering complex advanced analytical systems to mine unstructured data sources requires a complex decision-making process by the business analytics user to perform an analysis. In general, analytics is a process that often times requires continual iteration of the content sources(s) to locate, examine and interpret information to address an issue or hypothesis. This problem led us to explore a method to communicate, and eventually automate, an analytical pathway to be implemented with an analytical services system. In this paper we describe some of the challenges in the use of complex advanced analytics for business intelligence, an initial breakdown of the process and an approach to bringing repeatability to the analysis process.