A portion of this blog comes from Riskonnect partner Domo, a software company specializing in real-time business intelligence tools and data visualization.

It’s no secret collaboration is key to improving efficiency, productivity, and innovation, which in turn leads to better business decisions. Plus, when you apply the concept of collaboration to analytics, everything gets better. A lot better.

Collaborative analytics bring people, ideas, and processes together. Add business intelligence to the mix, and the entire process becomes an analytics powerhouse, enabling stakeholders to not only analyze current and historical data but share perspectives and zero in on actionable insights.

Think about it: without analysis and perspective from other departments, how can the legal team make strategic decisions that don’t negatively affect risk management? How can the safety team be as effective as possible if they don’t have insight from risk management?

Here are five ways collaboration boosts business outcomes:

  1. Strength in numbers: More input from people with different expertise—from data scientists and business users to executives and developers—leads to a body of knowledge built on collective wisdom, not disparate ideas.
  2. Faster decision-making: Aberdeen Group found that collaborative intelligence can speed up decision-making by 46 percent. That’s because collaborative tools keep everyone on the same page, so nobody’s lost working with last week’s data, or wasting time on redundant research.
  3. Foster innovation: It’s all about creative problem-solving. When collaboration around data happens, different stakeholders bring different perspectives on an issue, and different perspectives lead to new insights and innovative ideas.
  4. Boost confidence: Research shows that interaction with team members improves employee satisfaction and confidence. After all, everybody likes positive feedback. Collaborative analytics boosts and confidence and trust between teams.
  5. Boost your bottom line: Making faster, more effective decisions is hard to quantify in dollars, but faster decisions translate to money saved. According to Aberdeen, companies that encourage analytical collaboration experience an average of 18 percent in revenue growth and 5 percent higher operating profits.

The benefits are clear. Still, collaboration is often hindered by error-prone, manual data entry processes that ultimately result in untimely, inaccessible and confusing information. As such, data lives in silos, and therefore, departments, teams and individuals also function in silos.

The right risk management technology, however, addresses these challenges by offering automated reporting, access to live data, and real-time collaboration–otherwise, collaborative analytics. It serves as a single, unified technology solution that provides critical insight into all the strategic and operational risks across the enterprise, as well as what is being done to manage these risks to align with the risk tolerance of an organization.

More specifically, the right risk management technology surfaces your relevant risk information—from wherever it’s hiding in your organization—analyzes it, connects it with other internal and external data, and normalizes it securely in the cloud.

Further, the right risk management technology also creates meaningful and dynamic data visualizations, making actionable intelligence both easy to create and easy to consume—without having to be a data scientist.

Read Big Data, Small Data: How To Get From Insights To Action With Data Visualization

All this functionality leads to more collaboration. From there, you can easily answer critical business questions so you can focus where and when you need to most.

See how Riskonnect Insights allows teams to collaborate easily around real-time business data.