17 Feb 2022
By Aidan Wood, Solutions Engineer, Bellrock Technology.
In 2022, life revolves around data. We see it on our streets, as we look at how long it will take our bus to come, on our phones as it informs us how long we’ve been on our screens over the past week, and our online shopping registers log our weekly preferences.
For businesses and organisations, it’s never been more vital to gain maximum value from the data that customers and users generate. To do so, they need to make informed decisions based on this data quickly and efficiently to become more data driven.
This need has led to huge changes in how data is gathered and most importantly who within businesses and organisations gains access to this data. Previously it was the realms of IT departments, who acted as the ‘gatekeepers’ providing dashboards and analysis to those who needed them.
But changing business priorities brought in sweeping changes, accelerated and supported by the latest technologies which opened up access to data to everyone. This process is data democratisation, a representation of how accessing the latest data is now in the realm of all workers within a business.
Better access to data has been aided by advances in technology, hosted on the cloud, which removes bottlenecks caused by legacy tools and speeds up the process so businesses can make better business decisions, taking companies to new heights of performance.
Of course, that is if the process is done correctly. In practice, it might not be the case, as while data has been democratised, access to the right analytics has not.
True data democratisation only works if you also have analytics democratisation. But when it comes to analysing analytics, companies tend to put aside a big budget to employ experts and provide the specialist training needed to work with and understand dashboards.
This is borne out by the statistics. Last year, according to IDC BDA Spending, global spending on big data and business analytics topped $215bn. $11bn (just over £8bn) was spent in the UK.
But a Harvard Business Review report entitled Embracing Data Analytics for More Strategic Value also found that, while 89% of organisations believed analytics was essential to innovation, more than three-quarters of them admitted that they weren’t using data effectively.
There are two ways to achieve analytics democratisation: adapt the user to the tool you’re using, or instead adapt the tool to the user. Most organisations do the former, by employing more data engineers, system architects, and DevOps engineers while building data products with current cloud solutions.
But at Bellrock Technology we do the latter – a much less well travelled path, but one that allows users to be more productive and to make a real difference. It’s an approach that empowers smaller teams to build functioning live, secure, fast and intelligent, real time dashboards and data products quickly without having to rely on the skillset of extensive back-end technical teams, which may not actually exist in certain organisations.
Our platform Lumen®, delivers data solutions to end users at rapid speed and scale. It is an award-winning cloud software, which makes it faster than ever to build tailor-made data products. And it works for any business in any sector, from SMEs to corporate enterprises.
It is a single platform which provides end-to-end analytics, built complex-free to connect and combine data to unlock valuable insights and drive better evidence-based decisions.
Real data democratisation can only be achieved if it is approached hand in hand with analytics democratisation. Lumen can provide a roadmap to success that delivers 100% effective value from a company’s data at speed and at scale.
So let’s make analytics democratisation the new buzzword for 2022, and Lumen® the way to deliver it.
Aidan Wood is a Solutions Engineer at Bellrock Technology. He works with clients to quickly onboard their data and models into Lumen in order for them to immediately start gaining value and insights. Aidan will be talking at the Toucan Toco We Accelerate Your Journey webinar on Thursday, 17 February. To register, click here.
