Five Pitfalls That Can Derail Your Big Data Project
Beauty may only be skin deep, but when it comes to getting users to actually adopt an analytics application, it may be everything. Historically, end users have resisted giving up their spreadsheets in favor of more robust analytics applications because of the comfort they have with a familiar spreadsheet paradigm. In order to entice them away from a spreadsheet, an analytics application really has to provide visualization capabilities that are simply too much to resist.
With that issue in mind, Alteryx today released Alteryx for Visual Analytics, a single user version of its analytics application that supports a wide variety of visualization formats, including the increasingly widely used business intelligence software delivered as a service by Tableau Software.
According to Alteryx president George Mathew, there are roughly two to three million data analysts in the world that are vastly underserved by the visualization capabilities of their existing software. The majority of those analysts, of course, are relying on spreadsheet applications. By switching to analytics applications such as Alteryx, Mathew says that analysts will finally have access to the visualization capabilities they need to truly tell the stories that lie behind the numbers.
In addition, many of those analysts are relying on cumbersome spreadsheets that were never designed to handle the massive amount of data that is now becoming more routinely available thanks to the rise of any number of Big Data platforms.
Priced at $2,495 per user per year, Alteryx for Visual Analytics is also designed to help eliminate dependencies on data scientists. There are roughly 200,000 data scientists in the world. Mathew contends that rather than waiting years for data scientists to become available at a price point the average organization can afford, the savvier approach is to give analysts the tools they need to identify issues and opportunities without having to rely on a data scientist to discover them.
While data scientists may be in short supply, Mathew says the number of people in the workforce with quantitative mindsets has never been higher. The challenge is getting the kinds of tools those people need to not only apply their knowledge to the numbers that drive the business, but also actually share those insights in a way the rest of the business can understand.
