data management
with Salesforce, as well as data from
Unbounce or Google Analytics. This
will be vastly different from the needs
of your finance team, who will want
to blend data from Salesforce with
Quickbooks and some internal data.
Serving the data
Data centres must also evolve
to keep up with the self-service
revolution. Without the ability to
expand or contract resources as
needed, they can become bottlenecks
for analytics.
Moving your data centre
operations to cloud based
environments will enable you to
quickly access hardware and software
in an elastic manner. As you bring
more diverse data sets online for selfservice analytics, you’ll need a way to
easily acquire the hardware to support
these capabilities.
Another important step is to
decentralise your applications for
self-service. This is the only way
to truly enable business users to
independently access and analyse
data without IT support. Allowing your
line of business to make their own
decisions about what applications and
data they need – without first going
through the central administration – is
part of the new normal.
Rethinking data
management
Fortunately, BI technology has
evolved to simplify both data
preparation and access. Now, the
everyday user can connect, acquire,
and blend data from nearly any
type of source; cache it in a high
performance, self-tuning repository;
and prepare it using smart profiling,
joining, and intuitive data enrichment.
When users are empowered
with all their data and don’t have
BI technology has
evolved to simplify both
data preparation and
access
to constantly request access from
IT, they’re able to quickly see a
complete picture of the business
– not just pieces that they have to
mash together in Excel. By focusing
on this higher degree of self-service,
businesses and data centres can
empower users to make smarter
decisions that benefit everyone.
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