InetSoft Webinar: Why You Need Data Discovery Software

This is the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft in March 2013 on the topic of "Why You Need Data Discovery Software." The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, product manager at InetSoft.

Welcome to our webinar today. I’m looking for to talking about this topic today because I think we’re at the cutting edge of a lot of what’s going on in the BI landscape today. Let me shift to my agenda here to show what I am talking about today. So what I want to do is set the scene a little bit with some trends and objectives and just talk about what's going in the BI landscape and what I see as business drivers for change in BI.

And then we’ll talk a little bit more about data discovery and unified information access, some definitions and descriptions so you can see where we’re going with that. There was a report on data discovery and UIA recently so I will enumerate some of the issues that came up in that.

So I think you know this current observation. Probably no one would dispute this, but I think one of the big things going on in BI and analytics right now is the idea that we’re moving from a time when the focus has been on getting the data in and storing the data. Certainly all those issues are very important, and we could devote many, many webinars to those issues, but really I think most organizations are focused on getting information into the workplace, putting it to work, so that is not just sitting some place.

Companies want to make information the currency of things like customer service. This has become very important. Organizations try to develop long lasting relationships with customers and know more about their customers so they can tailor and personalize service. And this strategy obviously depends on good information flow throughout the organization to different business process and functions and particularly those facing customers.

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Expanding the value of information awareness across the organization and for individual users is very important so that there are repeatable experiences throughout the organization. As they move into analytics that’s a typical point for organizations, so that applications are not put out there for no reason.

Use information to increase and not decrease agility. I think one famous IT chief was describing to me how their information assistance really set their feet in concrete because of the models and schemas and really the important for locking down what the data is. Where we’re moving out into much wider and somewhat wilder world, where it’s not always clear what the data is, and but yet users need to look at that data quickly.

Social media data and things coming across the internet are examples of this. And so it’s important for BI and analytics, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. Data discovery and unified information access tools prepare users for those kinds of information sources that may not be as structured. They could be unstructured to or multi-structured, and all of these are very important to increasing the agility of organization so that they can look at more information make decisions quickly and be smarter about what is going on in their economic environments.

So then as a mission you don’t focus on stagnant information, but focus on the flow. How does it move through the organization? Who is using it? And these are important points. So I think the four really big goals for business intelligence, and I think we can group certainly data discovery and unified information access into this kind of technology. Speed, agility, and intelligence derive from these.

These are the things that really are goals for businesses today, and it’s amazing how closely they match up with business intelligence goals. So speed, organizations need business intelligence applications. They need those kinds of systems up faster. Delays are really not as tolerable as they used to be. You can have a long cycle and just likewise in business, delays cost.

They have a cost to them such as losing customers, not being able to respond to marketing events or market events, not being as efficient in the supply chain because the information flow is not optimal. Agility is about the ability to control and coordinate assets and activities across internal and external business networks to improve versatility and reaction.

Next: Business Intelligence Agility Helps Enterprises