Understanding Bring Your Own Analytics, and How It Can Work for Your Organization

Bring Your Own Analytics (BYOA) is a flexible approach that allows organizations to leverage their own preferred analytics tools or frameworks within existing software environments. This is in contrast to being limited to pre-built analytics solutions. Whether an energy company is digitally mature or in the early stages of digital transformation, BYOA offers several advantages that can help improve operations, enhance decision-making, and optimize costs across people, processes, and technology. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of BYOA from an industry-agnostic view.

A BYOA approach can have positive impact on an organization, regardless of its level of maturity with digital technology. BYOA helps organizations make the best use of the data available to them, when and where it’s needed most.

Flexibility and Customization
For digitally mature organizations, BYOA allows them to use advanced analytics tools they’ve already invested in, offering greater continuity and maximizing the value of existing technologies. It enables organizations to apply their preferred models, algorithms, and tailor reports to use cases.

For less digitally mature organizations, BYOA allows them to start small, leveraging open-source or third-party analytics solutions that suit their current level of maturity and scale up as they advance their digital journey. This flexibility can reduce dependence on costly built-in analytics and may accelerate adoption.

Empowering People and Improving Skills
For mature organizations, BYOA enables data scientists, engineers, and analysts to use familiar tools, which can increase productivity and job satisfaction. This can also minimize the learning curve associated with new systems, making it easier to adapt and focus on delivering insights.

For less digitally mature organizations, BYOA can reduce the barrier to entry by allowing employees to use simple analytics tools while providing the opportunity to upskill as their digital capabilities evolve. This can drive a culture of data-driven decision-making across the organization.

Enhancing Processes
For digitally mature organizations, they can refine their processes by applying advanced, customized analytics to specific operational challenges, such as predictive maintenance, asset lifecycle management, or energy optimization. This allows for more precise, data-driven decisions that can improve process efficiency.

For companies in the early stages of digital transformation, BYOA helps them adopt analytics incrementally into their processes. As they collect and analyze more data, they can identify areas for improvement and streamline operations without disrupting current workflows.

Supporting Vendor-Agnostic Strategies
BYOA promotes a vendor-agnostic approach, in which companies are not tied to a single analytics provider, allowing them to integrate tools from various vendors or open-source communities. This encourages a more agile and adaptable IT environment.

This is particularly valuable for energy companies facing fluctuating market demands, regulatory requirements, and technology trends, by helping them evolve without being locked into proprietary analytics ecosystems.

Scalability
For digitally mature companies, BYOA enhances scalability by allowing them to add new analytics capabilities as the business grows, without needing to wait for vendor updates or build custom solutions in-house.

For less mature companies, BYOA allows for incremental improvements and scalability, meaning they can start small with basic analytics and evolve as they gain more data, improve their digital infrastructure, and grow their workforce.

BYOA can offer flexibility and customization benefits, but it also comes with potential drawbacks that could negatively impact companies in several ways. These challenges - if not carefully managed - could lead to increased costs, inefficiencies, and complexities across people, processes, and technology. Below is a look at how BYOA might not benefit companies.

Increased Complexity
Integration Challenges: Implementing BYOA often requires integrating multiple analytics tools and systems, which can lead to technical complexity. The effort required to ensure that these disparate systems communicate effectively, share data seamlessly, and remain synchronized can be resource-intensive. This can also lead to data silos resulting in inconsistent data sets and analyses.

Higher Implementation and Maintenance Costs
Custom Integrations and Support: Developing custom integrations between various analytics platforms and enterprise systems (like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), or Asset Performance Management (APM) may require specialized development work. This could result in additional expenses for hiring consultants or dedicated staff to manage custom setups, driving up operational costs. This can also increase maintenance overhead for IT and OT teams.

Talent and Skill Gaps
Training Requirements: BYOA may require employees to become proficient in multiple analytics tools. This can lead to increased training costs and extended time-to-productivity as employees must learn to use unfamiliar systems effectively. For less digitally mature organizations, this can be a significant hurdle, especially if the workforce is not already accustomed to working with advanced analytics tools.

Data Security and Compliance Risks
Security Vulnerabilities: Using multiple third-party analytics platforms can introduce vulnerabilities, especially if these tools are not adequately vetted for security. Each tool integrated into the system could have its own security requirements and protocols, making it harder to maintain a uniform security posture across the organization.

Conclusion
Overall, BYOA can offer value to your industrial organization. For those that have been digitizing over the years, BYOA can offer the ability to further embed expertise in software systems to achieve more value. For less mature organizations, this could also be a good starting point in an analytics journey with the right talent. However, before you progress down the path of BYOA, it's worth considering costs, security, talent, and other factors. At GE Vernova, we focus on providing analytic templates along with the flexibility of configuring BYOA so you can achieve scale - with less risk - regardless of your digital maturity.