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.
Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) refers to a 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. It offers high quality data, which otherwise resides in poorly structured heterogeneous, complicated data sources.
Self-Serve Data Preparation is the next generation of business analytics and business intelligence. Self-serve data preparation makes advanced data discovery accessible to team members and business users no matter their skills or technical knowledge.
The term ‘Advanced Analytics’ can seem daunting to the average business user and even to the average business enterprise but the process is not as complex as it may seem.
Advanced Analytics is comprised of numerous sophisticated analytical techniques, designed to parse, explore and analyze data and produce results to support business decisions. Fortunately, today’s new self-serve business intelligence solutions allow for ease-of-use, bringing together these varied techniques in a simple interface with tools that allow business users to utilize advanced analytics without the skill or knowledge of a data scientist, analyst or IT team member. Advanced Analytics provides a 360 degree view of data from data marts, data warehouses, best-of-breed, legacy systems and other data sources. The analytical techniques and algorithms are designed to identify patterns and trends, pinpoint issues and the root cause of these issues and allow the enterprise to capitalize on opportunities and accurately plan for the future.
There is too much to do in a day to wait for someone else to give you the data you need. But, when it comes to data preparation and data analytics, business users are usually not comfortable with complex solutions that are time consuming or that require professional analytical skills. You pay your team members to have a certain type of expertise and that doesn’t always include technology or analytical knowledge. So, if you want them to be a real asset to the organization, you have to give them easy-to-use self-serve data preparation tools. Self Serve data prep allows business users to quickly gather and prepare data for analysis and to answer questions and solve problems without delay.
ElegantJ BI, a leading vendor in Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics solutions, is pleased to announce that it is listed for its suite in the Gartner ‘Other Vendors to Consider for Modern BI and Analytics’ report published August 4, 2017.
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.
I am going to be blatantly trumpeting of our products, its road map and its usage in this article, and you are likely to get more value out of this than a book on analytics. My guess is that you will read ahead since you are a sceptic.
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.
