Why Analytics Leaders Need to Read Data Preparation for Dummies

There’s a common misperception about data management, and it goes something like this:

Consolidating your organization’s data into a centralized analytics environment  solves everyone’s problems in finding, accessing, and using data. And when it comes to analytics, you can just run statistical algorithms leveraging high-performance computing engines and voilà! Relevant, accurate, meaningful, and actionable data appears like magic, ready to fuel the proactive and predictive business decisions that help your organization scale.

Easy, right? [insert sarcasm font]

Today’s data is more diverse, fast-changing, and complex than ever before. Succeeding with data management for analytics, reporting, and machine learning depends on a lot more than just moving and storing data. The reality is that 80 percent of an analyst’s time is spent preparing data—cleaning, structuring, and enriching it—to get it to a point that analysis is even possible. It’s time-consuming, tedious, technically challenging work.

The thing is, preparing data — or as we call it at Trifacta, data wrangling  — to get it into a form that’s suitable for analysis doesn’t have to be so hard. You just have to know where to start.

Start with Data Preparation for Dummies. Trifacta’s team teamed up with Ulrika Jägare, the Head of AI at Ericsson North America, to literally write the book on data preparation. It’s the perfect starting point for learning what data preparation is and how it compares to other data management solutions.

This short book is packed with useful information. It covers:

• • The rise in popularity of self-service data preparation solutions and the big shift from desktop-based products to cloud-native platforms
  • The main principles of modern data preparation, including data quality, data transformation and data pipelining
  • The democratization of data preparation so that everyone—not just data engineers or other highly technical staff with advanced coding skills—can do it

Data Preparation for Dummies was written for smart folks like you who are building a business case for implementing a data preparation solution in your own organization.

For example, in establishing your future business case, you’ll want to emphasize why democratization creates huge potential financial savings. Since IT typically lacks deep understanding of data’s business context, analysts have to step in and define and refine requirements time and time again. User-friendly data preparation platforms like Trifacta are changing in a way that non-technical analysts (in addition to technical users) are able to interact with the data they know best. With an intuitive visual interface guided by machine learning, business analysts can now prepare data themselves, ending the spin cycle of unnecessary iterations between teams that can cost companies millions.

Data Preparation for Dummies can help you further evangelize and industrialize data preparation as a critical, emerging technology in your organization. With architectural diagrams and real-life use cases, this eBook helps you prepare answers to your business and IT stakeholders’ questions such as:

• How are other organizations preparing data, and what are the benefits they’re realizing?
• Where do data preparation tools fit in the overall analytics architecture?
• Who are the ideal users of data preparation technologies?
• How is security and data governance managed?

Get smart about data preparation. Data Preparation for Dummies is all you need to know about data prep in one little eBook.