Modern data and analytics leaders know that every business user is different. No two marketers or finance managers will use data in exactly the same way because no two share the same contextual view or understanding of the business. Their challenges are as nuanced as they are complex. And they need insights tailored to their specific needs if they are to be successful at solving business problems with data. Unfortunately, traditional BI tools treat everyone like carbon copies.
Customers wanting to drive self-service analytics as part of creating a data-driven organization will often ask, “Can we achieve self service analytics, when our work force has low data literacy?” Or they might say they are not ready for self-service analytics, incorrectly thinking they need first to improve data literacy. But the two are inextricably linked. I liken it to teaching a child to read without giving them any books on which to build their skills.
Historically, maintenance has been driven by a preventative schedule. Today, preventative maintenance, where actions are performed regardless of actual condition, is giving way to Predictive, or Condition-Based, maintenance, where actions are based on actual, real-time insights into operating conditions. While both are far superior to traditional Corrective maintenance (action only after a piece of equipment fails), Predictive is by far the most effective.
In traditional data warehouses, specific types of data are stored using a predefined database structure. Due to this “schema on write” approach, prior to all data sources being consolidated into one warehouse, there needs to be a significant transformation effort. From there, data lakes emerge!
Over the past two decades, marketers have faced an uphill battle in trying to turn marketing into a fully data-driven discipline. Our challenge is not that we don’t have enough data but that data has been difficult to access and use. Marketing, sales, and product data is scattered across different systems, and we can’t get a complete picture of what is going on in our businesses.
