Human beings are visual creatures. Some of us can grasp complex ideas just by reading or hearing a simple description (I’m jealous of these folks), but most people need to see and experience a topic before we truly understand it. I very much fall into the second camp – I never met a good graph or chart I didn’t appreciate.
It’s this desire for visuals that has driven modern day business analytics. Organizations spent years and gobs of money building data warehouses in order to construct the single source of data that they could then organize in Access and Excel, or SQL for those who love to code. When Tableau released their 1.0 in 2005, it launched a revolution. Analysts across the line of business could more easily visualize their data and share their learnings across their organizations.
But in the decade since, the volume of data exploded, storage costs dropped and the validity of cloud-based storage was affirmed. Third-party applications for business operations matured and produced greater volumes and types of data. The idea of a single data source within an organization is now a novelty. From our research we conducted with Harvard Business Review, we know that most business analysts today now pull data from at least five sources for analytic purposes. And while they may be using an advanced visualization tool like Tableau to create dashboards for their data, in many cases the data is still being downloaded into legacy tools, such as Excel, so analysts can manipulate and blend. That’s a lot of complexity to tackle using pivot tables.
That’s where the struggle lies now – the ability to prep, blend, enrich, and validate data so you can analyze and verify your findings prior to visualization. It’s everything before the dashboard that consumes so much time and effort. Yet it’s the most critical step in the analytics process. If you can’t trust your data, you won’t gain much from the dashboard.
We invite you to join Alteryx and our trusted partner, InterWorks, on Tuesday, September 26th at noon Eastern / 9 am Pacific for our discussion on, “The ‘Before’ and ‘After’ of Impactful Analytics Today”. You’ll hear from Alteryx Certified Expert Michael Treadwell and Tableau Zen Master Robert Rouse as they detail best practices for optimal data preparation, analysis, and visualization. They’ll also share their experiences with creating a culture of analytics within different organizations, and they’ll offer their predictions on the future trends we’ll see in analytics.
Please join us for this eye-opening webinar. We’ll show you a path to addressing your toughest data challenges and improving your visualizations.
