In a fast-paced data-driven world, every business leader is under pressure to make quick business decisions and to make those decisions using data. However, for finding answers from data, however small, they have to rely on their analysts and reports. That takes time. So when faced with a choice to make a quick decision based on tribal knowledge vs a slow decision based on data, they go with a quick decision that is not data-driven. In this post, we talk about how a Data Catalog like DvSum with no-code search and query capability can put simple data self-service in the hands of decision-makers, driving fast data-driven decisions
Business leaders make business decisions every day. They understand the value of making those decisions driven by data. But, they are handicapped by the fact they are not technical, cannot write SQL, and therefore have to rely on their analysts to find every answer from data. That takes time. And in a fast-paced competitive environment, they don’t have time to wait for days or weeks for a pretty BI report.
They are faced with the age-old dilemma.
“being partially right and fast or being completely right and slow”
So they continue to make decisions based on tribal knowledge which prevents the enterprise from being truly data-driven.
So how do you break the logjam of moving your organization to be data-driven without sacrificing the agility of those decisions?
Carol’s story
Carol is Director of Customer Excellence at a Medical Devices company. She is responsible for making sure that her company’s wearable pain measurement device gives the best patient experience in terms of engagement and features. Carol is in a meeting where the department VPs are deciding on 2022 budget and roadmap. The question on the table is “Should we prioritize the development of mobile apps on Android in 2022?” Everyone is interested to know what percentage of the patient population uses android devices. This data exists in SalesForce under the company’s Patient demographic data.
Carol’s dilemma.
- She can “guesstimate” based on tribal knowledge . She’ll be able to answer quickly, get a decision and at the same time demonstrating command of her business in front of the Senior Executives. But, there is a risk that her tribal knowledge is off from what real data shows.
- She can go back and try to get the answer from the data. If she has to go back and get the answer from data, she knows, she cannot find the answer herself, she has to ask her analyst and her analyst has to talk to the sales team to get the information. The sales team would likely punt the question to IT, so it might be weeks, before she can answer this “simple” question. This means they may lose a first movers advantage to their competitors, and reflect on her as not knowing the answer.
So, Carol called to make is a response based on her tribal knowledge.
This is the age-old trade-off we have come to accept.
But, what if business leaders could be empowered to answer from data themselves and get it easily and quickly.
What if they could be agile and data-driven at the same time?
A business self-service Enterprise Data Catalog like DvSum Data Intelligence solution can help.
Enterprise Data Catalogs by definition create a centralized repository of all your Data assets in a company. Modern Data Catalogs also contain enriched information about that data – like definitions, profiles, and statistics. However, typical Data Catalogs are designed primarily for data-heavy teams – like Data Engineering, Data Analysts, Data Governance.
DvSum Data Catalog on the other hand, is designed also for people like Carol, who just want to be able to easily search for and find simple answers from data.
In our above example, when posed with the question about “What % of our customers use Android devices”, Carol opens up DvSum Catalog and searches for “customer and device type”. DvSum’s powerful search functionality looks for this text in dataset names, column names, description fields and gives her a list of datasets that have both customer and device type information. She further fine-tunes her search to Data Source as SalesForce. Once she finds the dataset, she can open the dataset, find the column containing device type, and looks at the column’s profile which shows the break-up of records by different device types.
That’s it. She found the information she was looking for. In less than 5 minutes and without relying on anyone else.
DvSum’s Data Intelligence solution puts data self-service in the hands of business leaders and decision-makers.
Empowering them to make data-driven decisions at the speed of business.
