The capability to blend information from data centres, cloud apps and even Excel spreadsheets on desktops is vital. With surging quantities of business data, leaders must free their analysts with the proper tools and processes to deliver insights in minutes or hours, rather than the days or even weeks that data blending has traditionally taken.
This will unleash a company’s analysts to achieve ever-greater things, while reducing the burden on its technical team and unlocking business possibilities that would otherwise have lain unnoticed. 2015 will be the year that companies realise this.
>See also: The emergence of data blending – and why business analysts are bypassing IT to do it
There’s an urgent problem when it comes to data analytics. According to Alteryx research, 72% of business and analytics leaders aren’t satisfied with how long it takes to retrieve the insights they need from data. Nine out of every ten of these dissatisfied leaders point the finger of blame at the inability to efficiently combine data from multiple sources.
The issue is only set to worsen for those businesses that don’t act quickly, as organisations grapple to extract value from a surging amount of data. An IDC report released in December estimated the total volume of digital data, globally, will continue to double every two years. This phenomenal scale was echoed by Gartner, which predicted that the volume of enterprise data alone will increase by 650% between 2014 and 2019.
This rising tide is placing considerable pressure on analysts and business leaders. Rather than enabling and supporting business decision-makers, chronically underserved analysts are becoming a bottleneck, spending their time blending together data from multiple sources, and preparing rather than analysing it.
Businesses need to act now to prepare and equip their entire organisation – not just the IT department – to deliver faster insights and make better-informed decisions. Data blending is the key to this.
The prominence of data analytics has rocketed, changing from the pursuit of a few niche specialists into a critical facet for all departments across an organisation. Every team is producing and gathering data, and the ability to quickly analyse and act on it is becoming a fundamental expectation.
Previously, these teams would rely on people with in-depth technical expertise to identify, procure and prepare their data, ready for it analysis. However, tools that remove the need for writing code and extensive training are handing analytical capabilities back to line-of-business analysts.
Gone are the days of IT experts wading through multiple layers of data access, interpretation, and analysis. Those people with the keenest awareness of a business’s priorities – the analysts themselves – can now be unleashed on the information directly. This is what effective data blending does.
Blend my data
Data blending brings together data from multiple sources so it can be combined and effectively analysed as a whole. Though it sounds similar to data integration, a widely known term within IT, there are some crucial differences.
Data integration combines multiple sources to create a permanent data store, such as a database or data centre. The data has been cleansed and formatted, and these stores are managed by database administrators. Access to the data is controlled by the administrators or business intelligence experts.
Data blending is a process rather than a one-off event like integration. Analysts can combine data from multiple sources to create a dataset aimed at answering a specific business question. Crucially, only the relevant data is merged and analysed, and the process is managed by business analysts rather than technical IT experts.
The benefits of effective data blending are clear. Firstly, the ability to merge data from multiple sources provides the analyst with a richer, clearer, more rounded business picture. It’s almost certainly better to compare a company’s customer purchase cycle data with external data on the industry norm, rather than only analysing its own data.
However, the empowerment of line-of-business analysts is the most pressing reason for business leaders to look towards data blending tools. Removing the need for a technical expert as a ‘data intermediary’ means that analysts – familiar with the business’s critical questions – can interrogate information directly. Analysts and business leaders with access to the right data, at the right time, can make swift and effective choices that ensure their organisation is competitive, efficient and effective.
Currently, delays in getting and producing data are actually causing real business problems. According to Alteryx’s research, organisations cite that not having the data they need delays business insights, which results most often in missed sales opportunities (37%), reduced return on investments (25%), increased costs (18%) and even losing out to competitors (9%.) Profit opportunities are being missed and this should be a rallying cry for business leaders to empower their analysts to deliver insight faster.
Turning point
The capability to blend information from data centres, cloud apps and even Excel spreadsheets on desktops is vital. With surging quantities of business data, leaders must free their analysts with the proper tools and processes to deliver insights in minutes or hours, rather than the days or even weeks that data blending has traditionally taken.
This will unleash a company’s analysts to achieve ever-greater things, while reducing the burden on its technical team and unlocking business possibilities that would otherwise have lain unnoticed. 2015 will be the year that companies realise this.
Sourced from Stuart Wilson, Alteryx
