When I first started my role as an analytics engineer, I was tasked with rewriting a bunch of data models that were written in the past by contractors. These models were taking over 24 hours to run and often failed to run at all. They were poorly thought out and contained a bunch of “quick fix” code rather than being designed with the entire flow of the model in mind.
A key part of business is the drive for continual improvement, to always do better. “Better” can mean different things to different organizations. It could be about offering better products, better services, or the same product or service for a better price or any number of things. Fundamentally, to be “better” requires ongoing analysis of the current state and comparison to the previous or next one. It sounds straightforward: you just need data and the means to analyze it.
Imagine having self-service access to all business data, anywhere it may be, and being able to explore it all at once. Imagine quickly answering burning business questions nearly instantly, without waiting for data to be found, shared, and ingested. Imagine independently discovering rich new business insights from both structured and unstructured data working together, without having to beg for data sets to be made available.