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Analytics

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JoshH
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

According to the Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics Platforms,  "By 2018, most business users and analysts in organizations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis as part of the shift to deploying modern BI platforms."1

 

This transformational shift is great for business users who desire to have better agility, flexibility and ease-of-use for their business intelligence and analytic tools. However, for IT and enterprise BI and data management professionals who are responsible for data governance, data quality and security, the trend towards self-service comes with some trepidation. But adopting self-service tools can be a win/win for all involved.

 

The tug-of-war between business and IT

The tug-of-war between business and ITFor years, business users didn’t have much of a choice when it came to business intelligence tools – they were stuck with the IT-led systems-of-record reporting tools. While these tools were controlled and governed, they didn’t offer much in the way of flexibility, they couldn’t keep up with the rise of volume and variety of data being adopted by the business, and led to business users adopting their own tools (typically data visualization tools) or reverting back to Excel for everything. So we have seen a tug-of-war of sorts between business users who want more flexibility and IT/BI teams who require more governance.

 

The problem with having a business-led solution is that there typically isn’t many governance requirements over the data. You have either Excel spreadsheets proliferating themselves across the organization or local data marts for data visualization duplicating data already in the enterprise data warehouse. This has resulted in the concept of a “single source of truth” no longer existing, not being able to tell who authored the data, where it came from, or how it was transformed. Simply put, it lacks any type of data quality or data governance standards and it can put the business at risk. But there has to be a balance between the two.

 

Pulling in the same direction

Flexibility and governance shouldn’t be a binary decision of either having one or the other. The business shouldn’t have to sacrifice flexibility, agility and easy-of-use, and IT shouldn’t have to overlook its governance and quality requirements. Everyone should be pulling in the same direction with a solution that meets both team’s requirements:

 

Business Requirements

 

  • Ease-of-Use – Provide easy-to-use tools with drag-and-drop functionality that enables business users to perform a wide variety of data and analytic tasks without coding
  • Flexibility – Self-service solutions should be able to accommodate, access a wide variety of new and emerging data sources, and work with the tools you’ve already invested in
  • Agility – Insights from data should take hours, not weeks or months. Look for reusable and automated processes that eliminates manual and time consuming tasks

 

IT Requirements

 

  • Governance – Ensure that corporate IT governance controls and permissions allow the right users to have access to the right data
  • Scalability – The platform should be scalable, sustainable, collaborative, and work seamlessly across teams
  • Security – User access to the application and the underlying data should take advantage of the latest authentication, authorization and network security best practices

 

Remember, it’s not a binary decision. You don’t have to sacrifice your IT requirements just to meet your business requirements. You really can have the best of both worlds, and I welcome you to learn more about how Alteryx handles data governance in our ongoing blog series about enterprise readiness. You can read more at, "Understanding Analytic Governance in Alteryx".

 

1Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Josh Parenteau, Rita L. Sallam, Cindi Howson, Joao Tapadinhas, Kurt Schlegel, Thomas W. Oestreich, February 4, 2016.

Josh Howard
Sr. Director, Product Management

Josh Howard is a technology product veteran covering trends in information management and based in the Denver/Boulder, CO area. He has more than 20 years of experience in developing product and go-to-market strategies across a wide variety of data technologies including business intelligence, analytics, data integration, and database development. He is currently the Sr. Director of Product Management at Alteryx. You can follow Josh on Twitter at @Joshoward

Josh Howard is a technology product veteran covering trends in information management and based in the Denver/Boulder, CO area. He has more than 20 years of experience in developing product and go-to-market strategies across a wide variety of data technologies including business intelligence, analytics, data integration, and database development. He is currently the Sr. Director of Product Management at Alteryx. You can follow Josh on Twitter at @Joshoward