My “Aha” Moment: Why I Joined the Decision Intelligence Movement

June 22, 2022 | Jakki Geiger

Last updated: February 22, 2023

Let’s start with a quiz. What do airline seats, apparel, and auto loans have in common?

On the surface, nothing. But dig deeper and you’ll find that these were some of the first products where data and analytics were used to make pricing decisions. Some super innovative leaders decided to shake up the status quo. They recognized that relying 100% on gut instinct was holding them back from making the best decisions for their business. Their “aha” moment led them to make a change and use data and analytics to make better decisions.

My “Aha” Moment

I was involved in this early data-driven decision-making movement called pricing optimization. As the head of marketing at a company called ProfitLogic (acquired by Oracle, and whose pricing optimization software is still being used to shape the pricing decisions of the top retailers across the globe), me and my team were educating the market about this breakthrough innovation to help them make faster, more intelligent decisions with data and analytics. The outcomes were impressive! Higher margins and sell-through rates made C-suite executives happy and ensured these pricing teams consistently received their bonuses.

This was a great introduction to the power of data and analytics. These people were non-technical. My first “aha” moment was realizing that access to data and analytics can empower anyone to make better decisions and get better results. And not just for pricing decisions, but all strategic, operational, and tactical decisions made by people across the organization. The key is making it easy for non-technical people.

Another “aha” was that I found my purpose. I deeply enjoy helping people make better decisions by educating them about breakthrough innovations in data and analytics.

Over the next 20 years of my career, I focused on educating leaders across industries such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, retail, high tech, and hospitality about how to get more value out of data and analytics to improve decisions, operations, and performance.

My Personal Experience Using Data to Make Decisions

In parallel, over the course of my 20-year career, marketing has undergone several breakthrough innovations using data and analytics. I understand, first-hand, the pleasure and the pain of using data and analytics to make important decisions. Here are some examples of the pain I’ve experienced as a marketing leader:

I have spent too many hours consolidating and reconciling data in spreadsheets or manually blending data from multiple data sources to report results, leaving little time to analyze the data for valuable insights to share and act on.
I have experienced the embarrassment of presenting data that was outdated and irrelevant because it was a few weeks old and a lot had changed.
I have been frustrated by not having the “technical chops” needed to use a “self-service” BI tool that didn’t allow me to interact with the data. Every time I wanted to explore a particular area and dig deeper, I had to call a data analyst and wait for them to finish their work.
I have created a lot of time-consuming and painstaking work for analysts when we changed anything at all, such as a data source, how we define a territory, or the way we calculated something, because that change would need to be replicated in every report . . . manually.

Even though I had developed a deep-seated belief in the power of data-driven decisions, I couldn’t easily access or manipulate all the available data and get the insights I needed to make data-driven decisions.

It turns out I’m not alone. Less than 20% of available data is used for decision-making. Fewer than 20% of employees use data to make decisions. At Pyramid, we’re on a mission to change that by automating the decision-making process with the power of AI guidance and empowering anyone to make faster, more intelligent decisions.

An Exciting Time for BI, Data & Analytics Leaders

It’s an exciting time to be a BI, data, and analytics leader. There is more data available to make decisions than ever before. More people—from the C-suite to the frontline—want easier access to insights to make faster, more intelligent decisions. And there is more demand for the sophisticated use of data and analytics to predict what could happen and prescribe what actions to take.

All this demand is happening at the perfect time. We have access to exciting new technology that enables BI and analytics leaders to speed up insights, scale adoption, and simplify analytics for any analytics need—from the simple to the sophisticated—including predictive analytics. We’re at the beginning of a movement called Decision Intelligence, which is the next breakthrough innovation in analytics.

Decision Intelligence Empowers Anyone to Make Faster, More Intelligent Decisions

I have had a front-row seat in the evolution of the data and analytics market. Business intelligence (outdated insights for the few) gave way to self-service analytics (inconsistent and siloed insights for the many, delivered by the elite few with technical skills), which paved the way for decision intelligence (a strategic, organization-wide approach to analytics that empowers anyone to make faster, more intelligent decisions).

Gartner named decision intelligence as a top strategic technology trend for 2022 with this definition: “Decision intelligence is a practical approach to improve organizational decision-making. It models each decision as a set of processes, using intelligence and analytics to inform, learn from, and refine decisions. Decision intelligence can support and enhance human decision-making and, potentially, automate it through augmented analytics, simulations, and AI.”

Put more simply, decision intelligence lets data and analytics leaders empower any person in their organization—from the C-suite to the front line and everyone in between—with the insights they need to make faster, more intelligent decisions, even if they don’t have a technical background in analytics or data science.

This is the change I’d been looking for. Most leaders would agree that data and analytics are strategic to their success. But when you look at the approach most companies take to invest in analytics, it’s not.

It’s Time for a Strategic, Organization-Wide Approach to Analytics

Most business intelligence tools and platforms were architected 20 years ago before AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba Cloud, Snowflake, and Amazon Redshift existed. Because of the limitations of legacy technology and the maturity curve of the market, most companies have not taken a strategic approach to adopt analytics. It’s been very tactical, siloed, and disjointed.

No wonder most people complain about the time it takes to get insights; how hard it is to drive the adoption of data-driven decision-making; or the effort required to entice people to use more sophisticated analytics to make decisions. Here are three big issues:

The analytics pipeline is disjointed.
Data prep teams have their separate tools. Analysts have their tools and processes, sometimes between 4-7 tools. Data scientists have their separate tools and processes.
BI & analytics capabilities are siloed across the organization.
Each department and function has its own BI and analytics tools. The marketing team has its tool, sales has its tool, and finance has its tool.
Data ingested into in-memory databases is ungoverned and not secure.
One of the biggest complaints we hear about is the lack of data governance and security because of the need to extract data from data sources into in-memory databases to get insights.

During a recent conversation with Dave Menninger, SVP & Research Director at Ventana Research, he said, “Our research shows that only one-quarter of organizations (26%) are very confident in their ability to make informed business decisions. Self-service analytics will never be sufficient; it leaves too much to chance and individual interpretation.”

It’s time for a strategic, organization-wide approach to analytics, where everyone—across the organization—with a curious mind can access a single platform from which to gather the insights they need to make decisions and drive the entire business.

Why I Joined Pyramid Analytics

The Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform is unlike anything I’ve seen in the $215 billion business intelligence and analytics market. It’s a breakthrough innovation that supports a strategic approach to the mission-critical process of using data-led insights to make decisions.

I’m excited about my work at Pyramid because I am working with data and analytics domain experts, I’m learning about the measurable business value that customers are getting by using our Decision Intelligence Platform, and I’m educating leaders about this breakthrough innovation and how it can help them improve all aspects of their businesses.

We are empowering anyone, from the C-suite to the frontline and everyone in between. Check out these examples:

C-suite executives are now using interactive dashboards to get insights to make strategic decisions. They can drill down into drivers and influencers with one-click explanations instead of picking up the phone. Joseph’s Health Customer Story
Frontline teams don’t need to leave the systems they access daily to get insights about their business and make better decisions. Philadelphia Healthcare Customer Story
BI & analytics teams can share insights through interactive dashboards, PDFs, or PPTs with internal stakeholders and external audiences, including customers, partners, and vendors/suppliers, without needing to move data. TFG Customer Story
Everyone can collaborate on the same platform which includes data prep, business analytics, and data science with the assistance of AI guidance. No need to take screenshots of dashboards and send them outside the analytics tool. Community Care Credit Union

Once we showed Dave Menninger the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform, he said, “Pyramid Analytics’ focus on decision intelligence is a step in the right direction, helping organizations look at the decision-making processes, not just analytics processes.”

The Decision Intelligence Movement

There’s a movement happening right now. More data is available than ever to help inform and make decisions of all kinds. There is also data in more different places than ever before, from on-premises databases to cloud applications to external sources. And more people want to use data to make decisions. These may be C-level leaders in a tech company, caregivers in a healthcare organization, salespeople in a clothing store, or janitors in an office building. Why not empower these people with the insights they need to make better decisions to do better work and produce better results?

The current approach to analytics is holding people back. Forrester recently reported that BI tools “are not as effective at driving decisions, actions, and business impact as they were intended to be.” Some 80% of decision-makers who should be using BI tools aren’t using them at all due, in part, to their “lack of personalization, which results in a subpar user experience.”

Pyramid Analytics applies AI guidance across data preparation, business analytics, and data science, consolidating all three primary data functions into one unified, complete, and super-fast platform to make it easy for anyone to use. That’s one of the big differentiators separating decision intelligence from traditional business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, and Tableau. In fact, Pyramid was ranked #1 in Augmented Analytics by Gartner in the 2022 Critical Capabilities^TMReport. What’s more, Gartner, BARC, and Dresner consistently place Pyramid on top of their analytics rankings.

“Decision intelligence can empower anyone with insights to make faster, more intelligent decisions with an automated, governed, self-service experience, or through distributed reports and dashboards, or through the system or applications they use every day with the power of embedding, but without the need to move data,” says Omri Kohl, Pyramid’s CEO and Co-Founder. “Decision intelligence is designed to support any person who is interested.”

Using AI to automate the technical work needed to prepare and analyze data and create and share reports and dashboards, the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform delivers data-driven insights for anyone to make faster, more intelligent decisions. It provides instant access to any data; enables AI-guided, governed self-service for any person; and serves any analytics need, from the simple to the sophisticated.

With this strategic, organization-wide approach to business intelligence and analytics, we are transforming how data is used. Pyramid is designed for humans. It’s designed for real people who want to make better decisions, act faster, capitalize on opportunities faster, solve problems faster, and innovate faster.

So much has changed since my early days of educating leaders about using data and analytics to price airline seats, apparel, and auto loans. But at my core, the motivation to help others by using breakthrough innovations in data and analytics is just as strong as it was back then. And I couldn’t be more excited about where we’re going.