Category Archive
Prep

The Science and the Art of Data-driven Processes

  The business decision-making process starts with raw data, which is then analyzed and interpreted as it turns into information. This, in turn, drives effective business outcomes as the information leads to insight and knowledge. Think of the data pipeline process as the central nervous system for decision-making, supported by self-service data preparation technology. There are many full-time roles dedicated to data pipeline operations such as the business analyst, data engineer, and business intelligence specialist,…

Practical, Self-service Marketing Analytics, Part 1: The Transformation Begins

These are the confessions of an uninformed marketer – the first in a series of posts that will highlight the transformation our own Altair marketing team is making with the help of self-service analytics. We’re eating our own dogfood! We’re walking the walk! My team and I are embracing analytics, finally. Our small marketing team (10 internal people plus our agency) has been data-driven and using reports and dashboards for years. We measure what many…

Everyday Data Users Can Now Achieve Extraordinary Results

In case you missed it, the latest version of Monarch—version 13.5 which was just released last week—is our greatest self-service data prep solution yet. With lots of new functionality and features, Monarch 13.5 lets you mine data from virtually any source and manipulate, blend, enrich and prepare it for analysis more quickly and easily than any other method out there. In short, Monarch 13.5 lets everyday users do extraordinary things. And we’re…

Bridging the Marketing/IT Gap

CIO Magazine recently ran a piece entitled Why IT and Marketing Need to work together, by Katrin Rabint. According to the article, “Technology is now a cornerstone for the marketing department because chief marketing officers are being pressed to intimately understand their customers, and their respective behaviors, to improve the relationship between the brand and consumer. As you may expect, this means that the marketing technology stack is quite complex.” In fact, says…

Dark Data Discovery: Improve Marketing Insights to Increase ROI

Post originally published on IBM Watson Analytics blog.   It’s no mystery that you can increase marketing ROI and program performance with better analytics, but what if you are spending more time looking for data than analyzing it? Data-driven marketing insights are attainable when you can effectively capture, analyze and link all the available data, marketing touches and associated costs throughout the lead generation and nurturing process. Unfortunately, as with other analytic domains…

Visualize Transformative Analytics with Advanced Data Access and Prep

JOIN IBM AND Altair LIVE! Webinar: Advanced Data Access and Data Preparation for Cognos Analytics September 27 at 1:00 PM EST Register today! Data-driven insights are attainable only when you can effectively capture, analyze and link all the data available to you. Unfortunately, the blind spots caused by “dark data” can plague and stall any analytics initiative. That’s why it’s important to have…

People Analytics in the HR Trenches – Make Your Spreadsheets Work for You

As HR leaders aspire to implement a “People Analytics” strategy in an attempt to be evidence-based and data-driven when addressing retention, engagement, diversity and inclusion challenges, most HR analysts, generalists, business partners and managers continue to battle common reporting challenges. Dealing with complex spreadsheets and inconsistent data has prevented organizations from evolving their People Analytics plans into a reality with business outcomes. Unfortunately, for most of you, your spreadsheets are not going away any time…

Independence from Data Prep – We Have a Winner!

When you work with data, you know one of the biggest causes for concern is just how much effort goes into the task of data preparation itself. This year’s CrowdFlower 2016 Data Science report suggested that data preparation alone accounts for 80% of the work data scientists carry out each day. This includes cleaning and organizing data as well as collecting data sets. Thankfully, self-service data preparation tools exist today to…

Six Intake Questions for Healthier Healthcare Reporting

It’s essential for healthcare providers to have the basic coverage of a healthy reporting strategy. This should include access to the right tools, metrics and resources for insightful, measurable and auditable metrics that also fulfill the compliance, reporting and analytics needs of a diverse set of end users. But developing a comprehensive healthcare reporting strategy can initially seem like a tough pill to swallow given the varying needs, IT infrastructures and existing reporting capabilities. Many…

Self-service ETL is real. It’s called data prep.

ETL can take anywhere from 1-24 months to provide the data you need. What if you didn’t have to wait for IT?