To satisfy end users who want easily accessible answers, many software vendors are looking to add analytics and reporting capabilities to their applications. Embedding analytics into applications can lead to wider adoption and product use, improved user experience, and differentiated products, but embedding analytics can also come with challenges and complexities. In this report, author Courtney Webster reviews several approaches and methods for embedding analytics capabilities into your applications. Should you implement a separate reporting portal, an in-application reporting tab, or go all in with a fully embedded in-page analytics solution? And do you build your own or buy a solution out of the box? To help you choose the right embedded analytics tool, Webster examines seven challenges—from customization, usability, and capabilities to scalability, performance, and data structure support—and presents best practice solutions for each.

Companies are collecting more data than ever. But, given how difficult it is to unify the many internal and external data streams they’ve built, more data doesn’t necessarily translate into better analytics. The real challenge is to provide deep and broad access to “a single source of truth” in their data that the typically slow ETL process for data warehousing cannot achieve. More than just fast access, analysts need the ability to explore data at a granular level. In this O’Reilly report, author Courtney Webster presents a roadmap to data centralization that will help your organization make data accessible, flexible, and actionable. Building a genuine data-driven culture depends on your company’s ability to quickly act upon new findings. This report explains how. Identify stakeholders: build a culture of trust and awareness among decision makers, data analysts, and quality management Create a data plan: define your needs, specify your metrics, identify data sources, and standardize metric definitions Centralize the data: evaluate each data source for existing common fields and, if you can, minor variances, and standardize data references Find the right tool(s) for the job: choose from legacy architecture tools, managed and cloud-only services, and data visualization or data exploration platforms Courtney Webster is a reformed chemist in the Washington, D.C. metro area. She spent a few years after grad school programming robots to do chemistry and is now managing web and mobile applications for clinical research trials.