Get More Value out of Your Existing BI Tools

Before joining Attivio, I worked for several years at Tibco Spotfire. It was a great experience. I was on the front lines as the worlds of Big Data and Business Intelligence (BI) collided.

Traditionally, companies relied on canned BI reports to help them understand historical data. Such reporting solutions have been around for decades. It was, therefore, very exciting to see that massive market disrupted by data discovery and analytic solutions such as Tableau, QlikTech, and Tibco Spotfire. These new, easy-to-use, data visualization tools helped analysts, researchers, and data scientists quickly self-serve insights from massive data volumes.

Instead of relying on a combination of static reports and massive spreadsheets to manually comb through huge data sets—an unreliable process that could take months—the new data discovery and analytic solutions instantly revealed trends, patterns, and outliers in mere moments, with just a few clicks. 

The value propositions were clear all around. For the business user, spend less time waiting in the IT data queue and more time analyzing data. For IT, control the proliferation of data marts and devote more resources to strategic tasks. And at the C-level, speed time to market and compete on analytics with greater confidence. 

Taking BI visualization to the next level

Today, the ability to visualize data in an easy-to-use analytics application is table stakes. The smart money is on organizations who have taken a broad view of how to get the most productive use out of those applications.

There are really four levels of analytics that organizations can pursue: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. To make these accurate and reliable requires more than just user-friendly tools. It requires making all the relevant data accessible to the tools, not just the data sets that your analyst or data scientist happens to know about.

Every global enterprise has thousands of information sources: data marts, warehouses and lakes, various files stores, and repositories. No one can keep a complete picture of that in his or her mind.

Getting access to the RIGHT data

It’s not just about an intuitive self-service application; today, it’s about what you’re serving yourself. It’s about preparing the right data for analysis. That’s where the action is now in the BI market – just beneath the application and just above the data source level. This middle ground is what Gartner calls the data preparation space. That’s where BI initiatives spend an inordinate amount of time—about 64 percent according Forrester.

Consider that statistic. If you were a manufacturer, would you be satisfied if you were spending 64 percent of you time sourcing parts? Not at all. Your data supply chain needs to be much more efficient than that as well. Otherwise, by the time you’ve gathered the data to analyze, its value could have plummeted. Like everything else, data has a shelf life.

Attivio can shrink data discovery and profiling from 64 percent of your BI project to minutes. And it can put the 90 percent of your data that’s siloed and inaccessible back in the game. We make BI tools better.