If your business spends a lot of time and money on the task of extracting, transforming and loading data (ETL) and preparing that data for analysis, you might want to consider the advantages of self-serve data ET. Self-Service ETL can and should be easy enough for business users so that your business can enjoy the benefits of advanced analytics without hiring a team of data scientists or IT professionals.
When you hear the term ‘Extract, Transform and Load’, does it make you want to run in the opposite direction? ETL, as it is called, refers to the process of connecting to data sources, integrating data from various data sources, improving data quality, aggregating it and then storing it in staging data source or data marts or data warehouses for consumption of various business applications including BI, Analytics and Reporting.
Can Your Business Achieve Self-Serve Data Prep? Lots of my friends talk about the difficulty of preparing data for analysis and how long it takes to get IT or data scientists or analysts to take on the project, get the data prepared and run reports or perform analytics. Frankly, this problem is a puzzle to me!
In today’s world, advanced analytics is for everyone. There is no reason to limit access to data preparation software or advanced predictive analytics to data scientists, analysts and IT staff. The evolution of augmented analytics and intelligence augmentation has created some impressive tools and solutions that allow business users with average skills to use self-serve data prep and complete data preparation using auto-recommendations and suggestions to work through the process easily and with no confusion.
If your enterprise is entangled in complex data preparation and manipulation, and you want to simplify and expand the use of data preparation to leverage data integration and self-service data prep, you need to explore the potential of augmented data preparation. Data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) can be a complex, time-consuming process, but self-serve data prep is ETL for business users.
Self-Serve Data Preparation is a critical component of augmented analytics. If these terms seem foreign to you, just know that they represent the future of business analysis. As organizations adopt self-serve business analysis, the business user with average technology skills must be able to leverage tools that are sophisticated, yet easy to use.
Self-serve has many meanings. You can pump your own gas, you can serve yourself at a buffet, and sometimes you can even do your own data preparation. You will notice that I said ‘sometimes’. That is because you have to choose the right tool if you want to really participate in self-serve data preparation.
Your business users are ready to do the job! They have a lot of data spread across the enterprise in various data repositories and forms and they want to pull it all together and analyze the data to get the answers to the questions you ask them every day. But, preparing that data is not easy.
Self-Serve Data Preparation (aka augmented data preparation) is all about efficiency and the presentation of sophisticated data preparation tools in an easy-to-use environment. The idea behind self-service data preparation is to give the average business user the ability to prepare, use, report on and share data without the assistance of IT staff or analysts, thereby making their jobs easier and making every team member more of an asset to the organization.
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.
