This article is sponsored by ClearStory Data.
In the fast-moving world of today, data is being created at lightning speed. Data comes from an infinite variety of sources, and all this data can be used to discover valuable business insights. Combining internal and external data can enable organisations to beat the competition, as the analysis will provide valuable insights. The more business users that work with such insights, the better your organisation will become. Organisations should, therefore, strive for a data-driven, information-centric culture, where every business user makes decisions based on data.
Enabling all users to have access to the data and the insights might seem difficult, but in fact is, at least from a technological viewpoint, easier than you might think. There are ample examples of great technologies that enable your organisation to mix and analyse the data and derive insights from it. With Big Data, IT is merely supportive and should just work, enabling the decision-makers to focus on what matters most. After all, the hard part is changing the culture within your company so that everyone will actually make use of the new insights.
Advantages of Data Collaboration
When all levels within your organisation make use of Business Intelligence derived from the Big Data analyses and are capable of collaborating with the insights, it offers numerous advantages. For example, you can maximise your sales by location or timing or get to know how your customers react to your campaigns. Collaborating with the data on a company-wide scale is rather difficult, however. Most of the time it requires printed slide decks with all sorts of visualisations or static C-level dashboards that are updated once a week or so. Although such Business Intelligence is still quite common and does give you at least some insights, the fast-changing world of today requires a different approach.
Organisations today should strive for a holistic overview of their internal and external data that is analysed on the spot and returned graphically via live storylines. Because when you are capable of discussing and exploring the data in real-time, or collaboratively in context of the whole situation and all the data you need (versus siloed views) to make more informed decisions, you can act faster on whats going on (opportunities and competitive threats) and take action if required. It was the combination of active data collaboration and blended data insights from more relevant sources that will shed light on opportunities for the business. Last week, I got a demo from a company who understand this paradigm shift and have the technology to make it possible.
ClearStory Data has created a solution to combine and analyse data from corporate and third-party sources and enable easy real-time collaborative analysis. Their software allows everyday business users to tap into more sources of data and drives deeper interactive, discovery-based and collaborative analysis for faster answers. The key to their approach is harmonising data from different sources, without the need for any programming or coding, and letting users explore and collaborate with the data in real time. The data stories are then all framed in a living, interactive visual storyline.
StoryBoards Will Enable Data Collaboration
This approach, which they call Interactive StoryBoards, enables employees at any level or location within the company to view, discuss, comment, provide explanations or suggestions and thus collaborate intensely with any of the data the company creates or uses. This can be done in real-time, so there is no need anymore for printed slide decks to be discussed in dusty meeting rooms that take too much time of anyone. This innovative approach could significantly benefit organisations that want to do more with data, and I think it will help organisations create that data-driven culture a lot faster.
How do they do achieve this? The key lies in the harmonisation technology that they have developed. This is the foundation of their application and converges multiple data sources (up to 25 different sources) without traditional ETL and tedious data wrangling into a single comprehensible view for analysis. Mixing data into a single holistic view will reveal insights that lay hidden in different sources such Sales data, mobile data, sensor data, consumer purchase patterns (POS data), demographics, social media data or for example weather data.
This is not an easy task, as the data need to be prepared and mixed before you can use it for diagnostic and discovery analysis. Ideally, you can do this the moment the data comes in, as real-time analytics will offer you the most benefits. To achieve that, ClearStory Data uses Apache Spark as the basis for their harmonisation. Apache Spark is specially developed for large-scale data processing, and it can run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk.
Thanks to the Spark layer, and the ClearStory Application Interface users can intuitively explore the data. They can slice and dice the data, add new data sources (the application offers a recommendation on how well the new source will fit into the analysis) or filters and the visualizations adjust instantly. This can reveal valuable relationships that can be the basis for adding more sources of data for additional insights. The analyses are being updated as per the fastest updating source or on a user-set schedule, giving users always the most accurate information. These Stories as they are called, can be created by anyone who has access to the tool, without having to know how to write code.
At the Strata Conference in New York, ClearStory Data revealed their latest innovation, the so-called StoryBoards that I mentioned earlier. These are a combination of different Stories brought together in a live and interactive dashboard that allows for extensive data collaboration across an organisation. With these StoryBoards, users comment and ask questions regarding the different stories, add more narratives, dive deeper into the stories and share the results easily. A user who has access to the live dashboard can track what has been said, which change was made and can easily go back to an earlier situation.
The objective of ClearStory Data is to advance self-driven Big Data exploration, so without the need for data scientists to perform quantitative analyses to give insights from multiple sources. With these StoryBoards, they have achieved this ambition and offer organisations a great tool to make the most of their data.