Do I Need to Hire a Dozen Data Scientists?

A couple weeks ago in “Justifying a BI Purchase“, we made the case of how the right BI tool is a worthwhile purchase even for organization’s that are struggling to get into the black, ones who don’t think they have the budget for BI. Last week, DATAVERSITY addressed another budgetary concern related to implementing BI, “Can My Business Achieve Optimal Analytics Without Hiring Dozens of Data Scientists?“. In addition to addressing a concern put forth by many organizations who are just starting to get their feet wet with data science and analytics, the article underscores the importance of bringing self service BI to nontechnical business users, a philosophy that we at InetSoft have been promoting for the better part of two decades.

“In this rapidly changing, increasingly competitive business landscape, the wise enterprise will focus, not on adding dozens of data scientists, but on capitalizing on the time and skills of those data scientists and analysts by giving business users the tools they need to make the day-to-day decisions and produce data-driven analytics that are accurate and timely without the assistance of a data scientist… As businesses incorporate Self-serve Advanced Analytics into their technology landscape and business users adopt these tools and begin to share and learn from data analysis, the business can transition to a more balanced environment that allows data scientists and analysts the time and focus to perform critical activities.”

The goal of self service BI is to have an organization in which BI is pervasive, even though the number of data scientists employed there may not be large. InetSoft’s drag and drop viewsheet technology enables interactive dashboards and visualizations to be built without the need for coding or other complex procedures. But more unique is our data worksheet technology, which brings a similar kind of visual UI to data mashup and transformation, enabling business users to created templates which mashup and modify data as it’s pulled from whatever sources.

The benefits of enabling this kind of self service is twofold. On the one hand, business users now have support for everyday decisions without having to wait on IT. This encourages exploration and an overall culture of data driven decision making throughout an organization. On the other hand, freed from the more mundane day to day requests, the organization’s data scientists can focus on the strategic projects that are truly essential to the organization, projects that demand %100 accuracy in results and a higher understanding of statistical analysis.

InetSoft interactive dashboards even have edit buttons, through which (if the functionality is left exposed) end users can quickly make simple modifications to their existing visualizations and reports, and even save their preferences. Click on the InetSoft dashboard below to explore such functionality.