Click to learn more about author Kartik Patel

The world of Business Analytics has changed dramatically in the past few years. If your business is looking to upgrade BI tools or to begin implementing an Analytics Solution, the solution must be user friendly for business users. The tools exist today for Augmented Analytics, Augmented Data Discovery, Self-Serve Data Preparation and other features and modules that provide sophisticated functionality and algorithms in an easy-to-use dashboard and environment that is designed to support business users, as well as Data Scientists and IT staff.

The concept of Advanced Data Discovery allows business users to leverage advanced analytics and helps the organization to create Citizen Data Scientists. Business users can quickly and easily prepare and analyze data and visualize and explore data, notate and highlight data and share data with others to identify the important ‘nuggets’, buried in traditional data, and to connect the dots, find exceptions, identify patterns and trends and better predict results.

While Augmented Analytics may seem too advanced for business users, the key to user adoption, rapid return on investment (ROI) and low total cost of ownership (TCO) is to select tools that are specifically designed to support data and analytical sharing, auto-recommended report formatting and auto-suggested analytical techniques based on the type of data the user is considering.

These Tools Should Include

• Self-Serve Data Preparation: Allows business users to perform Advanced Data Discovery and auto-suggests relationships, reveals the impact and importance of key factors, recommends data type casts, data quality improvements and more!
• Smart Visualization: Smart Data Visualization, suggests the best options for visualizing and plotting for a particular set or type of data, based on the nature, dimensions and trend of data.
• Plug n’ Play Predictive Analysis: Assisted Predictive Modeling and predictive algorithms (associative, decision trees, classification, clustering and other techniques) lets business users explore hypothesis and assumptions using Advanced Data Discovery and recommendations to perform early prototyping, and drastically reduce the time and cost of analysis and experimentation. Empowers business users with access to meaningful data to test theories and hypotheses without the assistance of Data Scientists or IT staff.

The benefit of auto-suggestion and auto-recommendation is easy to understand. Business users are more likely to leverage these tools and to gain valuable insight and make confident decisions and predictions if they can use tools that support average skills and do not require advanced technical or analytical experience and knowledge.

To be successful in business, every organization must find a way to accurately forecast and predict the future of its market, and its internal operations, and better understand the buying behavior of its customers and prospects. Advanced Data Discovery and Augmented Analytics tools help businesses to create Citizen Data Scientists by enabling the average business user to leverage sophisticated tools without the expertise and skill of a trained Data Scientist. These tools are necessary to business success in today’s market.