Empower Citizen Analysts (ECA)

Author: Michael Coates
Published: April 22, 2024

Organizations rely on a collection of Line of Business (LOB) applications to manage their day-to-day operations. Each LOB has audiences ranging from as discrete as a single department, all the way to applications that serve the entire company like Payroll, Expense Reporting, Travel, etc. In only the rarest of cases are these systems effectively integrated with each other or with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) deployment. Whether integrated or not, Information Workers (IWs) must collect and collate data from multiple systems to make business decisions through largely manual processes like:

  • Exports and Imports
  • Spreadsheet Merges
  • Cut-and-Paste
  • Manual data re-entry

Beyond the level of manual effort, these methods are impractical and potentially error-prone, leading to inaccuracies and inefficiencies.

Charter Global addresses these complexities with our Empower Citizen Analysts (ECA) offering, designed specifically to enable IWs to streamline the integration and analysis of data across disparate systems by minimizing the reliance on manual processes. ECA enhances accuracy, boosts efficiency and empowers IWs to make faster, more accurate and better-informed decisions by enabling a more seamless information flow.

Self-Service Data Integration for Efficiency

IWs face significant challenges compiling data across unconnected systems to report on operations. IWs must navigate through multiple LOBs and execute specific workflows to produce and correlate these data. Our ECA offering enables IWs to leverage their current data generation workflows and automate manual processes.

The process of merging this data typically involves labor-intensive and error-prone methods such as copying and pasting, synchronizing, and manually re-entering data. These approaches are not only inefficient but also increase the likelihood of mistakes, consuming valuable time and resources.

Understanding Empower Citizen Analysts

IWs recognize the value of the data locked away in LOBs and the potential business benefit of combining these data far better than most IT professionals, given their business focus. IT professionals are typically tasked with technology operations and don’t always have time to improve reporting capabilities. Our ECA offering turns this gap into an opportunity to improve data collection and reporting across disparate systems through automation.

ECA enables Information Workers (IWs) to set up durable connections without IT assistance, connecting disparate systems and data compilation using secure, low-code methodologies.

ECA empowers analysts, business analysts and business architects within an organization. Through this empowerment, ECA reduces the effort to acquire data from isolated systems to provide automated, all-up views of business operations. This enables analyst reporting across multiple departments, including isolated silos like Finance, Payroll, and HR, providing business benefits through correlation with other LOB systems, all managed by non-IT resources.

The Business Benefits of ECA

ECA provides a broad range of strategic benefits for business reporting, including:

  • Streamlined report production.
  • Improved report accuracy.
  • Improved report value.
  • Faster time-to-report.

ECA places report production into the hands of IWs who understand business operations, enabling them to evolve report production by adding additional sources for a more complete view of the business.

Contact us for more information about our Empower Citizen Analysts offering.