Data preparation tools come in many shapes and sizes and not all are equal. If your business is interested in implementing a self-serve environment where its business users can become a greater asset to the organization, and use data preparation for analytics, you definitely need to consider ease-of-use for your users and flexibility, sophisticated functionality and mobile accessibility for the good of the organization.
If your role in business demands that you stay abreast of changes in business analytics, you are probably familiar with the term Smart Data Discovery. You may also have read the recent Gartner report entitled, ‘Augmented Analytics Is the Future of Data and Analytics’, Published 27 July 2017, by Rita L. Sallam, Cindi Howson, and Carlie J. Idoine, highlighting the importance and benefits of augmented analytics, augmented data preparation and augmented data discovery.
By providing sophisticated analytical features and algorithms in an easy-to-use self-serve environment, the enterprise enables business users to perform data preparation and test theories and hypotheses and prototype on their own. Rather than preparing data at the central meta-data layer, and restricting what business users can do and see, IT enabled (rather than IT controlled), self-serve data preparation allows users to compile and prepare data and use that data in analytics to test hypotheses, perform visualization and create and share reports, and create custom alerts and other information. Business users can control the data elements, the volume and the timing.
