“Context is worth 80 IQ points,” according to serial inventor and famous MIT professor Alan Kay. Context is also one of the most commonly overlooked considerations when it comes to your data.

As data can’t physically talk, it’s our job to interpret, make sense of it so that we can boost our own organisational intelligence.

Generating insights from data is hard. That’s where augmented analytics comes into its own. Say your sales take a nosedive or suddenly spike up, you want to be able to drill down and understand the context of why these changes are happening and what factors have affected the changes – and you want it fast so you can take immediate action.

Most analytics tools tell you ‘what’ is happening (and rely on data analysts to run time consuming complex queries to dig deeper). Augmented analytics tells non-techie business users ‘why’ things are happening. And that’s worth its weight in gold.

If you’re a fashion retailer, it could be that an influential blogger has just posted something positive endorsing a particular product. Likewise, if you’re running an ad campaign you want to make ‘in-flight’ changes to your online advertising spend in order to respond to competitive offers. The list goes on.

Leveraging the power of augmented intelligence and machine learning means businesses can extract real-time insight from a vast array of data sources, ensuring a more cost-effective and efficient method of data analysis and business performance.

It’s this ability to quickly ingest data – usually the most laborious step and a common stumbling block – and dynamically query those multiple datasets (even with the flexibility and granularity of raw data) that makes augmented analytics different.

In plain English, that means your non-technical business users are empowered to connect, join, add, edit or remove chunks of data to get answers to questions they may not even have thought to ask.

That means the data scientists and IT colleagues can focus on more strategic issues and special projects while you’re able to get on with the task at hand. And because you get better insights, your organisation can make decisions and get better outcomes.

I get that it’s not always easy to stay abreast of all the technology, terms, and solutions in the analytics space, but augmented analytics is well worth taking a closer look if you’ve not done so already.

Just because you have a data analytics tool doesn’t mean it’s fit for purpose. Analytics, perhaps more than any other technical platform, shouldn’t be a static legacy tick in the box.

It’s important to monitor the progress of your business analytics capabilities in relation to your market demands, pace of business and particularly against the pace and agility of your competitors. Every business needs to understand how these solutions can and will affect users, processes and workflow.

Giving your team the right tools, and a simple way to manage the overwhelming flow of data and information, is crucial to your business success and will make every team member an asset to your organisation.

Whether its telcos looking to reducing customer churn, media giants trying to understand what’s driving audience engagement, or utilities companies looking at optimising network performance and consumption patterns, augmented analytics is raising the bar of organisational intelligence and redefining the best ways to monetise the insights your data is trying to give you.

Manjit Johal is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of augmented analytics specialist, Avora.