ManageEngine announced that its flagship IT analytics product, Analytics Plus, now enables users to gain faster insights by providing narrative insights into their IT data with zero human interactions.

New augmented analytical capabilities in Zia, the company's AI assistant, empower Analytics Plus users to make faster decisions and save IT costs, increase revenue and productivity, and improve end-user satisfaction.

According to the company's 2021 Digital Readiness Survey, over 75% of North American organizations have increased their use of business analytics to improve decision-making and 69% to leverage the available data. However, IT service desks continue to rely on database administrators to provide them with reports and dashboards to read, understand, and interpret their IT data. This process takes time and creates dependency on database experts, who may not be proficient in the IT department's operational tactics. This often means the generated insights are irrelevant or outdated by the time service desks gain access to it. Furthermore, these reports might not provide actionable insights, such as those obtained through advanced analytical and interpretive skills gathered from detailed charts, pivots, and dashboards.

"Having worked with the analytics market for over 10 years and in IT for over 19 years, ManageEngine understands the IT analytics market and its demand for a reliable, scalable analytics solution that offers meaningful insights faster," said Rakesh Jayaprakash, Product Manager at ManageEngine. "To meet these demands, we've enhanced Zia to read, interpret and provide actionable insights in the form of digestible narratives. Using this, users can easily understand trends, anomalies, deviations in their data, and get predictions on the future—all just by clicking one button. Accessible from every report and dashboard, these automated insights work behind the scenes to give you instant insights into things that need your attention right away."

While earlier users could get reports just by asking or typing in a question, there's always a need to drill down into reports and view underlying details, such as what caused the spike in IT spending, why there is a sudden increase in project backlogs, why are projects not meeting deadlines, etc. ManageEngine's conversational support for Zia, its AI bot, enables users to have meaningful conversations about key metrics and KPIs by asking further questions, and refining initial questions by adding further variables and parameters.

"In order to stay ahead of the curve, businesses need to make strategic decisions and plans for the future. These decisions are often based on predictive analytics. Although the theory is technically sound, in practice, predictive analysis tends to fall prey to one of these errors—over prediction or under prediction. Scenario planning eliminates the errors involved in prediction-based legacy planning systems by factoring in multiple scenarios. This allows users to effectively assess a situation by considering multiple outcomes—both in the positive and negative end of the spectrum," Jayaprakash said.

Scenario planning equips C-suite executives, IT leaders, managers, and senior staff members adequately to prepare fail-safe strategies that work in any given situation. It also enables them to create robust yet flexible strategies with the ability to adapt quickly to minor revisions and changes during critical situations.

Using scenario planning, users can:

- Assess the impact of various scenarios on the outcomes

- Identify the driving forces in any given situation and develop a range of possible scenarios

- Analyze the effectiveness of plans against critical uncertainties

Zia and predictive analytics are both available immediately at no additional cost in Analytics Plus.