Our very own meaning for Guided Data Discovery

We’re unusual – in our market space we prefer the term ‘guided data discovery’. The majority of business intelligence platforms deploy the term ‘self-service analytics’.

Putting my cards immediately on the table… I don’t think it’s possible for software to transform someone who has a normal, everyday relationship with data into a someone who can analyse it.

Analysing data – even analysing a simple chart – is not a trivial skill. The majority of us don’t have that skill. To acquire it, there’s a lot of work to do before getting to some ill-defined point at which it’s possible to describe oneself as “comfortable with data”.

We can all be brain surgeons, can’t we?

For us at Gavurin, the belief that most of us are NOT comfy with data, is a painful brake on the growth of our business. We are frankly envious that the major business intelligence platforms have so successfully marketed the notion that data analytics can be ‘self-service’.

If the market believes the ‘self-service’ claim then, at a stroke, the market is huge – capturing as it does those that can’t as well as those that can. It’s the business intelligence equivalent of self-service brain surgery – who needs the professional when anyone can wield a scalpel.

Faced with our belief that data skills are not easily deliverable by software, we’ve wondered what we can do to make data more accessible.  We’ve got two solutions… We hope to have more, but we’re taking baby steps!

Keep it Super Simple (KISS) – explore later

Kiss (Keep it Super Simple) means that our customer implementations usually open on ‘something’. To develop that ‘something’ we work closely with our customers to ensure that the data we open with is appropriate. This is an example of what I mean:

 

Note that the right hand menu has a list of the data to scroll to. From any chart, it’s possible to be guided to

• a simple interpretation of the chart
• more information about the data
• an ability to comment
• access to sophisticated further analysis of the data
• hyperlinks to the data sources

You can see these features in the next, very short video.

 

Guided Data Discovery should…

… enable a user to get as little or as much as they need from data.