Smart Data Discovery – The Future of Analytics and Business Intelligence

• Data Analytics

The average individual surfing the internet generates about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. To put that into perspective, that’s 2.5 followed by a whopping 18 zeros. This makes it significantly difficult to even imagine the amount of data being generated by entire organizations. Operating in a digital ecosystem where IoT is the order of the day, vast quantities of new data are constantly being created. Organizations are striving to better manage and analyze their data for improved Business Intelligence (BI), with 95% of businesses struggling with their unstructured data.

Organizations are now finding it imperative to employ Business Intelligence (BI) tools to extract every bit of value from all the data they are both ingesting and generating regularly. Analyzing and understanding the data enables businesses to gain new insights, optimize business processes and gain a competitive edge over their competitors.

It is this access to data and a better understanding of the metrics through analytics and insights, that fosters a culture of data-backed decision-making. A data discovery process that enhances operations, helps build better business strategies, and positively impacts ROI.

What is Data Discovery?

Data Discovery is the process of collecting and analyzing data from varied sources, with the objective of identifying patterns, trends, and outliers within the data. Analyzing both structured and unstructured data, the process helps to connect the different data sources, offers data visibility throughout the organization, and provides actionable insights through an interactive platform. These insights are leveraged to enhance business processes and gain a competitive edge in an already saturated market environment.

Almost every business collects massive data sets from their production processes, market activities, suppliers, and customers; and this is from both traditional and online transactions. Not taking advantage of all this data is foolish, and drowning in data is not an option.

The Shift from Manual to Smart Data Discovery

For the past two decades, organizations have been practicing data discovery without the aid of automation. With the help of Excel sheets and excellent cognitive capabilities, organizations carried out data discovery, documentation, and analysis. This was an inefficient process that took up a lot of time and effort, depending on an individual’s understanding of the data, and was subject to human errors that would be unavoidable. The insights gained were thus not always dependable and necessitated the shift to a Smart Data Discovery model.

With the introduction of Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and augmented analytics capabilities, Smart Data Discovery has become the pinnacle of a new generation of data technologies. Smart Data Discovery and Augmented BI tools help to capture, prepare, analyze and conceptualize the data, and present the insights on an integrated platform. A platform where the data is seamlessly translated into actionable insights, made available through an interactive dashboard, in real-time.

Moreover, it promotes better decision-making at every level of an organization; since the data is democratized and every employee irrespective of their technical proficiency can operate these self-service tools.

Smart Data Discovery is empowering employees with advanced data visualization capabilities, leveraging actionable business intelligence to bring about real change and optimize the business impact.

The Benefits of Smart Data Discovery

Smart Data Discovery offers a new approach to cleaning, analyzing, and understanding your data, in order to recognize patterns, trends, and anomalies that are affecting your business.

A comprehensive solution that fits in seamlessly and is user-friendly enough for any employee to operate and generate actionable intelligence. This intelligence gathering is the key to gaining a competitive edge and staying ahead of the curve by anticipating market conditions, consumer behavior, and even production processes within the organization.

The following are some benefits of employing Smart Data Discovery tools:

• an improved understanding of enterprise data,
• automated and contextual data classification,
• data visibility,
• faster time to insights, and
• promoting an insights-first culture that rewards data-backed business decisions.

Smart Data Discovery Tools – Salient Features

Data Discovery is a process that we can break down into three essential stages Data Preparation, Visual Analysis, and Guided Advanced Analytics.

Any data discovery tool or software that you wish to employ within your organization, should be able to create a robust foundation for the three above-mentioned stages.

To have a successful data discovery process integrated into your business processes, look out for the following key features that a smart data discovery tool should be able to offer.

• User-friendly interface: Professional analysts and qualified data experts should not be the only ones who can navigate the tool and understand the data. Data democratization allows every employee to have access to business data and valuable insights that can help optimize business processes and maximize ROI. An efficient data discovery tool requires a user-friendly interface to support data democratization and a free flow of information.
• Quick insights from huge data sets: Time is money in a fast-paced industry environment. You cannot afford to wait for business intelligence and let decision-making be affected by delayed time-to-insights. Your data discovery tool needs to be able to integrate the massive amounts of data from multiple touchpoints, filter it, analyze it and deliver actionable insights in real-time.
• Data visualization: We as humans process images faster than text or numbers. A robust data discovery tool should be able to generate interactive data visualizations that simplify analyzing and understanding the data, helping you to act on the insights with clarity. A consolidated dashboard where simple yet powerful visuals amplify the insights.
• Advanced features: A quality data discovery tool should offer advanced chart features to conduct quality analysis and derive maximum value from your data. The tools should be able to combine multiple charts and their data, provide advanced comparisons, have color-coded indicators for different outcomes, and formatting capabilities for discovering underlying patterns and trends.
• Custom fields: Professional data discovery tools enable users to create custom fields for matching their unique business requirements, where they may need to merge different fields or create new ones. Modify the tool to fit your business, and effective utilization of the tool will help you improve your business.
• Simplified sharing: Being able to seamlessly access data across teams and collaborate, is a key attribute your data discovery tool needs to embody. It is the very essence of self-service BI.

Smart Data Discovery delivers the potential of Big Data to everyday businesses and ordinary employees. Data is no more reserved for qualified analysts.

Explore Augmented Analytics tools such as Course5 Discovery and foster data-driven decision-making. Get AI at scale, with a customized tool delivering relevant and actionable insights through an easy-to-read interactive interface. Build up your organization with data transparency, where everyone can access business data, leverage the tool’s features, and promote an insight-first culture. Improve operational efficiency with automation delivering high-quality insights for effective decision-making, improved value, and maximized ROI.

Get in touch with us and transform your business through automated analytics and insights.

---