Author: Andy Tauro, Performance Architects
In the ever-changing landscape of industries large and small, a question that arises in the minds of financial decision makers is, “What is data discovery and how it is changing the approach to business intelligence (BI)?” At Performance Architects, we are also often asked, “Why do I need a solution for data discovery? Isn’t that what my BI solution is for? Isn’t my BI solution supposed to help me parse my data, to gauge the pulse of the state of the company or organization and give me the answers that I need?”
While legacy BI solutions are very good at answering the questions that have been asked, what about questions that arise due to unexpected market factors that impact your business, such as the introduction of a new product in a peripheral market that suddenly changes consumer consumption behaviors. That is what happened to the publishing industry with the advent of the modern smart phone. As a result, your customers are suddenly expecting more from your product that they were very comfortable with just a short while ago. At times such as these, unless you have a crystal ball that actually works, you are probably wishing you had a way to spot new trends as they are evolving, to give you as much advanced warning as possible to stay ahead of the curve.
(image – oracle.com)
With the ability to incorporate new data sets into existing data (usually of vastly different structure), good purpose-built data discovery tools like Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID) can parse updated data sets to pull out characteristics like sentiment and objects like products, places, and names from textual data. These can be quickly tabulated into existing reports, or visualized using graphing tools that are present in the toolset itself. This informs a data modeler, or data scientist, about data dimensions that may not have been visible before, and allows for updating BI models to ask new questions. Even existing BI tools like Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE) 12c or Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS) have add-on tools like Visual Analyzer, that allow for the visualization of on data sets with little to no involvement needed from infrastructure (IT) teams.
For this reason, data discovery tools (either purpose-built or add-on), can be of tremendous value to decision makers, allowing decision makers to become self-sufficient through making relevant decisions that won’t become obsolete before they’re implemented. It is important to pick a solution that is easy to use, yet is powerful enough to incorporate new data sets into existing models quickly, and to efficiently parse them to provide the decision points that matter.
Need help determining what these tools are, or how they can help you? Give us a shout, and we will be glad to help.