If you want your business users to function and perform at their highest level and you want to optimize all resources, your data discovery solution must provide the guidance and ease-of-use that a business user requires to analyze and share data and make confident decisions that will improve the business bottom line.
One of the most common excuses used to avoid data democratization and self-serve augmented data discovery is that the organization cannot guarantee data integrity and that, if business users have access to dated, incorrect or incomplete data, the resulting decisions will not be better but rather worse than the decisions made today. Further, this theory says that the distribution of this inaccurate data will have a systemic effect on truth and promote disastrous business decisions. There are several mistaken assumptions in this theory, and several ways an organization can guarantee success in a data democratization initiative.
The benefits of advanced data discovery do not have to be limited to data scientists or IT staff. If you choose the right data discovery tool, your business users can enjoy the benefits of confident business decisions, shared analytics and a common approach to, and understanding of, data-driven, fact-based metrics and results.
Search Analytics or search-based analytics marks the advent of a new era of business intelligence, in that it allows business users to ask a question using natural language and that question is translated by the system to produce results.
Don’t think that advanced analytics is too complicated for your business users. Nothing could be further from the truth! You can create Citizen Data Scientists and improve the analytical abilities and outcomes for your average business user if you give them the right tools.
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.
