Affecto Oyj : Data is the New Black—This is How Data Handling Will Change in the Near Future

Studies say that people working with data spend 80% of their time with data preparation and only 20% with making insights of it. We all know that data preparation is vital to get reliable results, but it's also incredibly time-consuming-and often the most tedious task, analysts say.

Making a human error is a little bit too easy when we're working manually with data, whether it's an Excel sheet or any other tool. When working with data, even the tiniest mistake might cause severe consequences as we use the results to make critical business decisions.

Businesses are ready to invest in data preparation tools

With self-service analytic tools, the risk of human error is reduced to the minimum. With data profiling, the self-service tools are warning you when they detect a possible aberration. It's already a step forward when we're talking about data accuracy.

Today, the data is coming from several sources, from perfectly organised Excel sheets or data warehouses to completely messed-up and unstructured sources like data lakes. Finding, cleaning, integrating and transforming all this data is the most retardant task. There's always room for new tools that make the data preparation process faster, easier and smarter.

Different options for automated data preparation work are soon coming and improving in self-service, both on-premise and cloud-and companies are willing to invest in them to enable more efficient and enjoyable working hours. Companies are learning that the data is indeed the new black. Organised, clean and accessible data will fuel the willingness to dig deeper into the big data in the future.

READ ALSO:The Time for Self-Service Analytics is NOW - But Why?

Data is only useful when it's accurate and accessible

Using self-service analytics is easy, but it doesn't help you if the tool relies on poor-quality data. Beautiful visualisations get you nowhere if you can't trust the source of information.

'We're talking about phenomena called SISO = shit in, shit out. To avoid this, you need to consider data preparation, accuracy, data governance and security as they all go hand-in-hand.'

Data governance will become more and more important in the future. The more critical the process, the better the data needs to be governed and documented.

Finding the perfect balance between the data access and security is more vital than ever. In most companies, IT will remain as 'the gatekeeper' of data and decide who will have access to which data. It's true that not every business user needs all the information in their hands, but on the contrary, it's also good to remember that anyone could make an insight no-one else has ever thought before when diving deep into the world of self-service.

Therefore it's important not to restrict the data access too much but to let people have access and play with the data. The collaboration between the IT and the rest of the business has to and will multiply in the future.

The only question is; How to find the right balance?

READ ALSO:10 reasons to hop on the self-service train right now if you haven't yet done so

Learn the built-in features of your self-service tool to ensure data accuracy

Today, there is a countless number of data sources from social media and news sites to weather forecasts and public reports. Therefore you need to have a certain awareness of the accuracy of data when making critical business decisions based on it.

Learn the features of your self-service tool to easily detect hidden problems like duplicate records, missing or invalid values and unexpected characters. With IT department sharing the access to certain data, the analysts need to be aware of what exactly is the data they're looking at.

This is where the most mistakes happen, and this is why increasing collaboration and transparency in the data governance is vital to your business.

Keep in mind that data isn't your enemy, but your best friend. Learn to get the best benefit out of it and have fun!

To help you get started with self-service analytics, we created a trend report explaining the basics of SSA and providing you with the benefits, the challenges, the recent changes and the future insights of self-service analytics. This trend report will not only give you reasons why you should start using self-service right now but also how to get started with SSA with a few simple steps.

Are you ready to take your business to a whole new level? Download the report now!