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.
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.
This might be a strange comparison but let me make it anyway! Think of data agility and data quality like a tight rope act. The tightrope walker is thinking about getting to the other side without falling. The audience wants to see grace and beauty during the process. They want to see a QUALITY act. In the case of the tightrope walker and the audience, they sometimes have very different goals.
It seems that everyone today is talking about Citizen Data Scientists. For some organizations the concept is perhaps frightening. The term may conjure up images of novices trying to do the work of someone with years of training and failing miserably in the process. For others, the image may be of an organization run amuck with business users leveraging sophisticated advanced analytics tools to create and share data that may be misinterpreted or distributed improperly.
I vote for Data Democracy. Why? Because data belongs to everyone in your organization and if you can find a way to provide data democratization, and provide your business users with mobile BI tools, self-serve business intelligence, social BI tools and self-service data prep, your organization WILL reap the benefits.
