Anything that can help your business users to understand, interpret and analyze data is a help! Users have many tasks to perform in a given day and while analysis may not be their forte, they definitely need clear, concise data to share, to make decisions and to see opportunities, challenges and patterns.
Assisted Predictive Modeling, Predictive Analytics. Those terms strike terror in the hearts of most business users, and that is understandable. These mysterious-sounding terms sound complicated and lead business users to imagine confounding, confusing algorithms, and endless strings of numbers.
Your enterprise and business users do not have the time or the inclination to sift through complex data or wade through instructions to learn how to use complicated business intelligence or advanced analytics tools. They don’t want to document requirements and wait for IT or analysts to produce a report (only to find out that the data is incomplete or that the data was delivered too late to make a confident decision).
Have you ever noticed that when you give someone something, they often want more? This is especially true when they really like what you gave them! As the concept of business analytics becomes more main stream and business users embrace the possibilities, they (and their managers) want and expect even more tools and more potential. They want better solutions. BUT, don’t make the mistake of interpreting the need for more sophistication and detail as a need for more complexity. Business users are still business users and, as organizations pursue the natural progression of business analytics, the emergence of Advanced Data Discovery enables those same business users to enjoy the benefits of more sophistication, more possibilities and more data sharing without the need for IT staff or data scientist involvement.
There is too much to do in a day to wait for someone else to give you the data you need. But, when it comes to data preparation and data analytics, business users are usually not comfortable with complex solutions that are time consuming or that require professional analytical skills. You pay your team members to have a certain type of expertise and that doesn’t always include technology or analytical knowledge. So, if you want them to be a real asset to the organization, you have to give them easy-to-use self-serve data preparation tools. Self Serve data prep allows business users to quickly gather and prepare data for analysis and to answer questions and solve problems without delay.
Smart data visualization takes the guesswork out of data analysis. Why ask your business users to use cumbersome, difficult tools to analyze data or expect them to wait for professional analysts or IT staff to satisfy their analytical needs. They have a job to do and you hold them accountable for results but if they don’t have the right data visualization tools, they can’t get the most out of data.
Predictive analysis is very important to your organization. If you can dependably predict and forecast results, you can stay ahead of the competition, address changing customer needs, capitalize on opportunities and solve problems before they negatively impact your enterprise.
Oh, the confusion of advanced analytical terminology. Read a report, attend a conference and your head is swirling with terms like ‘assisted predictive modeling’, plug n’ play predictive analysis, smart visualization, augmented data discovery and augmented data preparation. Add to that, the sophisticated concepts of auto-suggest, auto-recommend, time series forecasting, causation and prediction and classification techniques and you may feel that you need a degree in data science to do your job.
Advanced Data Discovery is only possible with the right data discovery tools. If you want to encourage smart data discovery, you don’t need smarter users – you need smarter tools. Advanced Analytics Tools should be simple enough for every business user to perform advanced data discovery using auto-suggested relationships and revealing the impact of decisions and changes within the organization.
What is self-serve data preparation? It isn’t a method of making up data. It is a method of preparing data that allows the average business user to compile and analyze data without the assistance of a data scientist or an IT professional.
