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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If your organization is implementing self-serve business intelligence, it is important to balance sophisticated tools with the skills of the average business user. While algorithms and advanced data analysis are a great benefit, if business users find these tools daunting, they won’t adopt them, and you won’t improve productivity, or timeliness or accuracy of decision-making.
Nearly every organization has BI tools, but not every organization takes the Smarten approach to business intelligence. The components of the Smarten approach include self-serve data preparation and Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis, both of which (when combined with Smart Visualization and Advanced Data Discovery tools) provide a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, solution that supports business users and data scientists alike.
