How to Simplify Your Workflow Using an Insights Hub

You may have heard the term “embedded insights” or "embedded analytics", or maybe this is the first time you're hearing it. For some, this term isn't well understood. For others, it's indistinguishable from the term "business intelligence". 

We're here to help you understand what exactly are embedded insights (and embedded analytics) and how to use them. In this article, we breakdown the term "embedded insights", give you an overview of the concept, and share some examples of how to use them to simplify your workflow. As defined by Gartner, embedded analytics is a digital workplace capability where data analysis occurs within a user's natural workflow, without the need to toggle to another application

What Are Embedded Insights?

Think about a time you needed a vital piece of information and the lack of this info threatened to cripple your entire workday. You know it’s there somewhere in your company’s data, but you're just not sure which app to use or where to find it.

The only way to find your answer is to spend hours manually searching through data, trying to dig out a needle in what feels like an infinite haystack. Even if you find "the needle", it might not be quite what you were looking for. Or, the data is hard to understand because it's jumbled up in a mix of numbers, charts, and graphs.

Embedded insights aim to solve this problem. They bring together data, information, and action by integrating with business applications and workflows, both ensuring that data is not lost and the user experience is improved. Information is presented clearly, which allows users to understand a piece of data in the right context and build connections with different elements throughout the text.

Embedded insights make your work life a whole lot easier by doing these five things:

1. Analyze data, insights, and action in a single platform.
2. Automate the correlation of data and information, making it accessible at scale.
3. Provide context-sensitive information that is relevant to the user.
4. Allow companies to better understand their customers by providing them personalized experiences tailored specifically to them.
5. Give companies a better understanding of their workflows and allow them to develop new strategies.

When working with embedded insights, you will never have to scan your company’s entire database to find relevant documents. All this info and data comes to you without toggling to another application. 

How Are Embedded Insights/Analytics Different from Business Intelligence?

Managers and executives typically use embedded insights and business intelligence (BI) interchangeably. After all, both derive insights from data. It’s how they gather and present information that makes all the difference.

These are the three key differences that set apart embedded insights from business intelligence:

1) Function

BI refers to systems and tools that collect and organize data from multiple sources. It typically lies outside your workspace, and provides information in the form of charts, tables, and graphs. Managers and executives use this to spot trends and make decisions.

Embedded insights, on the other hand, derive information from preexisting systems and platform integrations. It combines dashboards, reports, and metrics that your business needs to make decisions based on data and live within your workspace.

2) Nature of data

BI usually comes with data visualization tools and software. Because it exists outside a company’s IT infrastructure, it provides information without context. The user has to do all the legwork if they want to make sense of it.

Embedded insights are a mix of existing IT infrastructure and business needs as they pertain to data. This allows for unprecedented levels of data collection and visualization, which can provide more context for users and help them make better decisions.

3) Complexity of the data

With embedded insights, you get valuable and actionable intelligence readily available to you in your workspace. BI, on the other hand, is made up of raw datasets. It only stores the information in an organized manner. It doesn’t analyze it. The datasets are often complex, and users need to go through many steps to find the key insights they want.

Embedded insights are much easier to use. They are provided with context and relevance to the user. 

How to Use Microsoft Teams as an Insights Hub

If you haven’t been using Microsoft Teams to gather actionable insights, you're not using it to its fullest potential. Microsoft Teams is more than a platform for online collaboration. The right integrations and tools can transform it into an insights hub that can aggregate data and present it on your dashboard automatically. Some examples of embedded insights that are available in Microsoft Teams include:

1. Comprehensive customer information and complete sales data.
2. Insights from chatbot conversations. 
3. Support articles and knowledge base resources such as company wikis, tutorials, solutions, and more.
4. Aggregated data and workplace analytics.
5. Just-in-time insights gathered through integrated tools like ModuleQ’s People-Facing AI and Power BI.
6. Productivity Dashboard that keeps track of everything you need to make sure that you are working productively.
7. Conducting file and data searches that span thousands of files with disparate formats across multiple services.
8. Reports on crucial KPIs and metrics.

How You Can Implement Embedded Insights Into Your Workflow 

The People-Facing AI platform by ModuleQ provides a powerful integration with Microsoft Teams for easy to use embedded insights. It can link together any data it finds on Microsoft Teams and add this new information to the rest of the data it already collected.

If you want to learn more about the subject, our blog is a great place to start. Ready to make the jump into using embedded insights? Contact us.