Interactive Analytics – A Tool for Opening Up Your Data

To be successful working with big data, organizations really need to get their data into the hands of the people that know the data the best.

In the past, this has been rather difficult to do. Back in the ‘old’ days of business intelligence and data warehouses, many organizations were trying to get their employees as far away from the data as possible. This was accomplished by most organizations by creating reports or dashboards for people to review to be able to see their data.

Like I mentioned in “Opening up your Data”, the problem with reports and dashboards is that they are static. They show you what data looks like at a point in time and deliver relevant data and information to users but they haven’t historically allowed people to ‘play’ with the data in the reports.

Again, many times this approach is OK but when you want to start ‘doing’ big data, you’ve got to get much more dynamic with your approach to data, reports and dashboards. You’ve got to get your data in the hands of the people closest to the problems you are trying to solve.

This is where a good master data management (MDM) systems and processes combined with good visualization and interactive analysis systems can bring real value to an organization.

With systems like SAS’ Visual Analytics combined with good MDM processes and systems, you can put your organizational data into the hands of the people that know your problems the best. Using an interactive analytics system like SAS Visual Analytics allows non-technical employees to analyze, visualize and model data in a very straightforward manner using an interactive user interface that includes simple to use drag-and-drop types of systems.

Additionally, using modern day interactive analytics systems allows organizations to analyze and visualize their data in a very dynamic manner. Using systems that allow in-memory analytics dramatically speeds up analysis and modeling by allowing users to constantly change models and analytics inputs and outputs to see how different variables might interact with each other.

Giving your employees access to properly managed data combined with interactive analytics packages opens up an enormous amount of value to the organization and the organization’s data. With the rush to gather and process more and more data, opening up that data to more people within the organization is a must. To do that, you can use many different tools and systems but interactive analytics is one of the best tools available today.

This post is brought to you by SAS.