Unlocking Data Preparation for Business Intelligence (BI)

We live in a world surrounded by data. From our daily grocery shopping, to our mobile phone usage, fitness regime tracker, bank accounts, social media etc., practically everything we do is either driven by or a contributor to data volumes. In this blog I would like to reiterate the importance of data and data preparation in the rapidly growing and demanding data warehousing world. This is only a single use case in a wide variety of applications for data preparation tools in today’s business environments. In later blogs, I’ll also cover some best practices and various potential use cases of Talend Data Preparation tool.

Let’s start with the journey of data. Data has evolved significantly in last decade. It has grown in its size, content, value and state. Today data comes in a variety of shapes and sizes and volumes. It may range from a small sample set to a million, billion or even trillions of pieces of data consisting of capricious states like text, voice, video, tapes, etc.

For many years, the data warehouse was believed to be static because data didn’t change that often. However, in today’s world data warehouses are either real-time or near real-time, dealing with rapidly changing data. Today businesses are becoming data driven and they are investing heavily in data preparation either with self-driven tools or with their data warehouse.

Data, at its core, is basically the raw details of transactions/events/statistics/recordings collected for a reason primarily for business improvement, competition or product feedback. This raw data is not necessarily transparent, but it is very important as it provides the foundation for reporting the information businesses metrics and trends to make crucial decision or run operations. Having the right data is important for an organization to have insight on the criteria needed to ensure optimal business performance, uncover areas of improvement and drive other key aspects of the business. For example – for an organization like Talend, it is important to measure the number of active clients, expiring licenses, revenue and upsell/downsell from each client, etc. Having accurate data about the health of your business is important in order to make informed decisions and ultimately keep ahead in today’s data-driven competitive landscape.