In a fast-paced digital economy, it is imperative that business decisions are based on data-driven insights. Traditionally, decision-makers in business have relied on a specialized group of IT, BI, and Analytics teams with access to data and skills to analyze the data to generate those insights. With a surge in the volume and velocity of data, this is no longer sufficient. Businesses need everyone in their organization to be data-enabled, especially the decision-makers. This requires Data Democratization.
Data Democratization means that EVERYONE in your organization can leverage data for improved business performance. This means that regardless of someone’s role in the company, they have access, understanding, and skills to use data effectively.
Current approaches to Data Democratization are ineffective.
Data Democratization != Data Access
Just providing access to data doesn’t mean users can now use it. Well, you can look into your own organization, where you probably have given access to a curated layer of your data warehouse to a business function. Do you find business users actively using it. Most likely No! Why? Because using data effectively requires finding the correct data and be able to perform analysis with the data.
Consider the users that use data effectively today. Those would be Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and related roles. All of them use some form of a data analysis tool that requires skills to query the data, most commonly with a SQL interface.
Now consider your typical business analyst or business user. Their exposure to is delivered reports or Excel. Just giving them access to your database ain’t going to magically allow them to start querying the data.
Data Literacy Programs != Data Democratization
Recognizing that just giving access is not sufficient, many organizations are running Data Literacy programs to enable Data Democratization. These typically involve 1) Conducting data maturity assessments 2) training business functions on data and self-service BI tools (SSBI) like Tableau and Power BI. While a good start, this is not sufficient and effective. Because this approach is time-consuming and does not remove the barrier of technical skills required to use these SSBI tools.
How DvSum helps you achieve Data Democratization
DvSum empowers business users to become data independent via a self-service, no-code capability within DvSum’s Agile Data Catalog (ADC) solution. It allows business users to find, access, understand, and analyze data without need for SQL or other technical skills and without relying on Data Analysts. As a result, we close the gap between business needs and technical skills for data analysis to accelerate the data-driven culture.
Watch the video below (<5 minutes) of how it works in DvSum ADC.
