We humans love to consume.
Food.
Water.
Fuels.
And my personal favorite Chocolate.
You name it we want to consume it. Health warnings have little effect at deterring us from consuming mass quantities of the wrongs things. Yet sadly there is one thing that we need to survive and it seems that no matter how hard we try we simply can’t consume enough of it … DATA.
We need to consume data to survive in our own lives, as well as within our occupations. Yet try as we may we seem to be starving for it. I believe part of the problem is that unlike eating chocolate there is no “right” way to consume data. We humans are all over what I call the Data Consumption Continuum and can’t figure out how to accommodate one another’s ferocious appetite for this particular commodity.
Static Data
Reports are the most basic form of data consumption. Static reports have been around much longer than we have had computers and or a specialty field called Business Intelligence. They are a wonderful thing in situations where the subject matter doesn’t change. Whether it be workflow reports, ie lists that I mentioned in my last post we love to consume or whether it is truly static data like reports of what our Accounts Receivable was as of a particular date.
So there are good reasons to have the 3,209 static data reports your company has. But it simply doesn’t make sense to have business meetings end with the conclusion “Yep our company is losing money. Let’s all have a great week and enjoy the last days before we are unemployed.” Someone in the meeting is inevitably going to ask the “Who, what, when, where and why” questions. Thus report 3,210 ends up being born over the course of the next several hours, days, weeks or months.
Guided Analytics
Many including yourself may think of guided analytics as the polar opposite of static reporting. I’m not one of those people.
I believe guided analytics are a wonderful way to speed up the process of asking questions and getting answers. They allow you to “drill, drill, drill” until your heart is content. My posts have praised and demonstrated the many different ways that visualizations enable us as human beings to more rapidly perceive and consume massive quantities of this wonderful commodity we call data.
For some guided analytical applications are like a sudden speed reading course. The applications allow them to consume the data from 3,209 static reports in 1 sitting. For others it’s like handing their companies 0’s and 1’s to Michelangelo and suddenly a beautiful portrait of their company appears.
The definition of the word continuum is “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct.”
For all of the wonderful things guided analytics offer I see them as a mere single step away from static reporting for one reason. They only allow you to answer the questions that you already had in mind when the applications are built. If you think you will want to see how surgical costs relate to length of stay you build your application to contain that data. It’s great that we have the technology now that enables us to consume that many 0’s and 1’s at the same time, in really slick visual ways. But is it really so magical that we are able to answer the questions we had when we asked for the application to be built?
Self-Service Analytics
Hopefully you now understand why I’ve used the phrase “data consumption continuum” and why I believe guided analytics are but a single step away from static reporting. If you don’t then you stopped reading already, so those that are still tracking with me are ready to take another step forward on the human consumption continuum to self-service analytics.
I’m honestly baffled by the concept that self-service analytics are a way to allow end users to quickly visualize data from some a single data source. Woo-hoo look at the pretty pictures I can create for you from your XLS file or a single SQL query. Really??? That’s a leap forward in technology? I’ve never known a version of Excel that didn’t offer charting right inside the tool itself. If all you want are pretty graphics from a single data set just use the tool your data is in which is likely Excel.
I believe self-service analytics enables us to answer the questions that we didn’t have when we built our guided analytics solutions. It enables us to consume all of the data we built into our application and then begin consuming more data. Data that perhaps wasn’t even available when our guided analytics applications were constructed.