Terms like Advanced Data Discovery and Augmented Analytics can seem mysterious and daunting for the average organization. Managers, executives and IT staff may believe that business users cannot and will not adopt advanced analytics tools because these tools can only be used by data scientists, programmers or business analysts.
If your organization is planning to implement advanced analytics tools or to democratize the use of data discovery tools, your IT staff and senior management are probably concerned about losing control of data access and about data security. Data governance is a real concern and it should not be minimized but there is no reason to change course and decide against data democracy just to accommodate data governance.
Self-Serve advanced analytics and data discovery software is an important competitive tool in today’s rapidly changing environment. Data resides in a lot of places within the organization and access to that data in an intuitive, integrated environment is important.
Augmented analytics, augmented data discovery, advanced data discovery…all of these terms can seem intimidating but they don’t have to be. In fact, it might be less intimidating to think of advanced analytics software as Smart Data Discovery. When you use that term, you acknowledge the most important factor in this process, namely that the software itself is ‘smart’ and that using advanced analytics tools is not a process that is limited to data analysts or data scientists.
Augmented analytics can help your business users to find and understand critical data and to do their jobs more effectively. Without the knowledge of a data scientist or an IT professional, business users can perform advanced analytics, using features that guide and make recommendations at every step so that data is prepared, viewed and analyzed in a way that ensures clarity and a comprehensive understanding of trends, patterns, and data sensitivity and success thresholds.
Augmented Analytics and augmented data discovery is a form of advanced data discovery that automates data insight using machine learning and natural language generation. It automates data preparation and makes it easy for business users to enjoy data sharing.
There are so many new terms in the business intelligence and advanced analytics domain. So, what is augmented data discovery, and why is it important for your enterprise? Augmented Data Discovery (aka Smart Data Discovery), takes the enterprise beyond data monitoring and helps users discover the more subtle yet crucial factors that affect business success. It identifies hidden issues and patterns within the data so the organization can address challenges, capitalize on competitive and market advantages and plan for the future with more confidence. There are a couple of components to the augmented data discovery continuum.
There is a new business role on the horizon and, at first glance, it may seem very much like a role that was introduced a few short years ago. This new enterprise role is known as an ‘Analytics Translator’ and, while there is some confusion regarding the distinction between this role and the newly minted Citizen Data Scientist or Citizen Analyst, there are some subtle but important differences. In a previous article (What is an Analytics Translator and Why is the Role Important to Your Organization?), we discussed the definition of an Analytics Translator. Here, we will discuss the role of Citizen Data Scientist and Analytics Translator and how they differ. To understand these roles, let’s look first at the somewhat more familiar role of Citizen Data Scientist (AKA Citizen Analyst).
The concept of Augmented Analytics may sound complicated (and it may, in fact, be a challenge for a software vendor to accomplish), but the new augmented data discovery tools are quite easy to use. Unlike the data discovery tools of old, business users do not need to look to the IT staff or data scientists to perform advanced data discovery.
Advanced Data Discovery allows business users to perform early prototyping and to test hypothesis without the skills of a data scientist. Advanced Data Discovery ensures data democratization and can drastically reduce the time and cost of analysis and experimentation.
