Self Service Analytics

Recently articles about data analytics have  pointed to the need for products that are designed for the Self-Service user. Historically data analytics have been done by data professionals or IT personnel with temperamental, complicated tools. In a recent article by Daniel Gutierrez, discussing the future of data analytics one point that he brings up is the changing trends and benefits of self-service platforms that enable the everyday user to function as data analysts.

Many companies have built visually appealing and informative features into their software trying to empower less-experienced users to easily analyze and identify trends in their data with the goal of helping them derive new strategies for business. This can be helpful at times, but sometimes just makes things even more difficult to understand. While it is good to enable business users to analyze data, if the data is corrupted or out of date users are still left in the dark. By building queries on a foundation of accurate data and addressing data quality initially users are able to reach more accurate conclusions. This is why at Aim-Smart, we believe that giving business/self-service users the power to match, deduplicate and verify the quality of data is a necessary first step for their data analysis.

By creating a tool with the goal of achieving data quality in Excel, Business/Self-Service users are able to clean, match and deduplicate data in a familiar environment. This decreases the learning curve of a new product for less experienced users. In addition it allows users to manipulate the data by using the existing Excel features they are familiar with. By allowing users to build their queries on a clean data foundation they can reach conclusions with greater accuracy. Another benefit is that this removes the need to move data back and forth with IT personnel for cleansing and verification, this reduces possible data corruption points.

Is your company ready for the future of data management? Have you taken the steps necessary to empower your employees to make business more successful?