TIBCO Spotfire named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Preparation Solutions, Q4 2018
There is a golden rule for analytics and data science. Your results are only as good as the data that you work with. Essentially, it’s garbage in, garbage out. That’s why it is so important to have high-quality data in order to get meaningful insights from your data analysis. However, attaining high-quality data is not an easy task. Analysts spend 80% of their time cleaning, preparing, and transforming their data just so that it is suitable for analysis. The need for high-quality data has been traditionally underserved by analytics tools in the market, resulting in the rise of numerous standalone data preparation tools.
But, is using a standalone data prep tool the right approach? In certain cases, maybe. But in most cases, probably not. In general, it does not make sense for users to spend 80% of their time outside of an analytics tool and in a data prep tool with a totally different user interface and steep learning curve. That means yet another tool to learn and master which propagates the “analytics is difficult” stigma and leads to gut-instinct decision-making rather than data-driven decision-making by users.
The task of data preparation is actually a highly iterative process and not linear at all. That’s why we like to call it data wrangling. It is unintuitive for users to tell what’s wrong with the data if they haven’t looked at the data. That’s where exploratory data analysis comes into play.
In Spotfire, inline and AI-powered data wrangling helps users spot issues, fix data quality problems, inconsistencies and deficiencies as they interact with data. Users don’t need to go outside Spotfire to prepare data before visualizing. They can combine, shape, clean, enrich and transform data all while doing data exploration.
Spotfire automatically captures all of the transformations and data wrangling steps and lays them out in the data canvas, as a fully editable data workflow. Everything in the data workflow is editable and users can share the steps that can be easily reused by others in the organization. This is really powerful and a significant time saver.
