May 5, 2020
With the pace of business change accelerating, traditional IT technology and team structures cannot stay the same. Decision makers need easier access to all relevant data at the right time. They are investigating data from different perspectives than those offered in standard reports and dashboards—and they need to do it today.
In many organizations, departmental acquisition of self-service and, increasingly, cloud-based tools for business intelligence (BI), visual data discovery, and data loading and ingestion has exploded. Users want to apply these tools to access data faster so they can answer crucial business questions sooner. Industry experts see the spread of sophisticated self-service tools as enabling a new culture of “citizen data professionals”—that is, data-savvy business users and analysts who do not have IT expertise but who want to do more of their own data ingestion, refinement, analytics, and visualization.
Organizations must update their technology strategies to support citizen data professionals; tools must empower everyone with good data. The key to this modernization is effective use of code-free, lightweight software to unburden citizen data professionals from manual, time-consuming data chores.
This TDWI Pulse Report examines obstacles that hold organizations back. We will also recommend four key strategies that support citizen data professionals and enable them to make powerful business decisions.