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OK... but where are decent user-friendly tools to manipulate, manage and share data and insights? Really, the problem is that to this day data in Corporations i

by kfk 10y ago

OK... but where are decent user-friendly tools to manipulate, manage and share data and insights? Really, the problem is that to this day data in Corporations is a mess. The moment you step out of the standard warehouse systems you find yourself navigating a mess of spreadsheets, word docs, power points, all showing sometimes the same data in different formats. You duplicate data every time you send an Excel file by email... this data needs to be in sync and when not people get screamed at or fired. That means a lot of work goes into manually maintaining thousands of different files to make sure they tie to the overall picture. It's a mess. The bad part is that nobody is looking into this, everybody is focusing on analytics or reporting, which by now are the easy part. Then you have ancient tools like HFM or BPC that try to "enhance" spreadsheets and spreadsheets consolidations. They don't work. They are barely reliable and they cost a lot of money for no reason (they are simple SQL databases, they can't even be compared to much more complex software like salesforce or similar). Then Corporations are now being sold this all "big data" thing, which is old by now for tech audiences, but it's just new for most of the big companies nowadays. Unfortunately, while big data has a lot of potential, it further moves away investments on good old small data where probably there is much more ROI to grab simply because solving this problem is not that difficult and not that expensive if you want to actually fix it. Then now everybody wants to do Predictive, but Predictive won't beat saving hundreds of employees thousands of working hours by improving the efficiency of how we handle data and data insights. You can literally create a new workforce out of the many hours you would save with better efficiency in this area. Without even considering that on top of efficiency, you get much better, more fact based, decisions driven by the overall increase in transparency which you lose when insights are spread around thousands and thousands of files. There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Software solutions like Tableau go in the right direction, but they do not provide the much (more) needed tools to properly manipulate and manage data and, especially, consolidations and integration. The only way to get out of this mess is to control the data flow but especially to have 1 and only 1 data flow. That means once your insights are approved and locked, every other view should read this data, there should be no manual intervention any more. If the locked data is wrong, it will be wrong for everybody, which is a good thing compared to having multiple copies of the same and then people fighting on which one is the right one.

sqldba 10y ago
You're spot on. I can tell you work in Enterprise as well and I feel your pain brother/sister. 1. Everyone is willing to sell you something that is going to manage all of your disparate legacy data, except that somehow nothing ever seems to die in the Enterprise and instead you end up with users of the unmaintainable legacy system AND a second system on top (and third, and fourth) that now also all need to be maintained. > Analysis and reporting are the easy part. I don't agree on this point. They're just as hard as ever. Of course you have Excel, Reporting Services, and Power BI. But everyone wants you to formulate the QUESTIONS as well as the ANSWERS. As soon as they discover all of the issues you've found, now it's bury-your-head-in-the-sand-time, because they just want to whittle it down to that top 1% of 1% of problems so that their stats look good; whack it into a daily email, which goes onto a daily KPI sheet, and the underlying issues they originally wanted to know about of course never (or rarely) get fixed. Progress! 2. Let me tell you about Big Data! It's a codeword for: * We know you've never archived or thrown anything away before, that you have data coming out of your ass. * We also know you'll never use it. You don't have the funds, inclination, or staff to use it. But one day we're going to build something that will magically do it all for you. So you better keep holding onto it. * Oh yeah and we have something to sell you to help you keep holding onto it all until that magical day arrives! Please send us a purchase order. Thanks. I love data. I am sure that some companies like energy companies and telecoms do actually have to deal with massive amounts of data. But Big Data has become a management buzzword that doesn't mean much except retaining everything and spending money. If you retain everything you never have to make a decision about what to destroy. Management loathe having to make a decision to destroy anything that they might be held liable for, but also love spending money on something that they can use to justify that they're solving a problem. Thus the success of Big Data. 3. Predictive. I can't comment. Everyone talks about it but I don't see the solutions in the real world. Most of us are stuck in Excel / SQL and just starting to dip our toes into R. When everything else in life is hard, predictive becomes just another harder thing to avoid. > There is some light at the end of the tunnel. What you're talking about is Master Data. Of course the well for this has already been poisoned long ago and woe to all who sip from it. Everyone loves starting an MD project that siphons data in. But the second people have to manage the data inside and start cleansing it and making decisions - it falls in a heap. It rarely gets to the stage where data is then written back to source systems it's game over (LOLOLOL many a vendor I have left in the dust just asking them about this - "That's phase 2" they say - and they've never had any single customer reach it). -- Back on point about the article though, it looks like an interesting way to structure data and it could probably do as an Excel add-on of some kind. I expected something that would create a database but unless there's more than the video this is just writing queries? This is all well and fine, I guess, if it adds usability. But nobody's jobs are going anywhere. The article says this tool can create anything SQL-92 can. Good luck... I deal with shit daily that you couldn't even begin to imagine.

by kfk 10y ago

sqldba 10y ago

You're spot on. I can tell you work in Enterprise as well and I feel your pain brother/sister. 1. Everyone is willing to sell you something that is going to manage all of your disparate legacy data, except that somehow nothing ever seems to die in the Enterprise and instead you end up with users of the unmaintainable legacy system AND a second system on top (and third, and fourth) that now also all need to be maintained. > Analysis and reporting are the easy part. I don't agree on this point. They're just as hard as ever. Of course you have Excel, Reporting Services, and Power BI. But everyone wants you to formulate the QUESTIONS as well as the ANSWERS. As soon as they discover all of the issues you've found, now it's bury-your-head-in-the-sand-time, because they just want to whittle it down to that top 1% of 1% of problems so that their stats look good; whack it into a daily email, which goes onto a daily KPI sheet, and the underlying issues they originally wanted to know about of course never (or rarely) get fixed. Progress! 2. Let me tell you about Big Data! It's a codeword for: * We know you've never archived or thrown anything away before, that you have data coming out of your ass. * We also know you'll never use it. You don't have the funds, inclination, or staff to use it. But one day we're going to build something that will magically do it all for you. So you better keep holding onto it. * Oh yeah and we have something to sell you to help you keep holding onto it all until that magical day arrives! Please send us a purchase order. Thanks. I love data. I am sure that some companies like energy companies and telecoms do actually have to deal with massive amounts of data. But Big Data has become a management buzzword that doesn't mean much except retaining everything and spending money. If you retain everything you never have to make a decision about what to destroy. Management loathe having to make a decision to destroy anything that they might be held liable for, but also love spending money on something that they can use to justify that they're solving a problem. Thus the success of Big Data. 3. Predictive. I can't comment. Everyone talks about it but I don't see the solutions in the real world. Most of us are stuck in Excel / SQL and just starting to dip our toes into R. When everything else in life is hard, predictive becomes just another harder thing to avoid. > There is some light at the end of the tunnel. What you're talking about is Master Data. Of course the well for this has already been poisoned long ago and woe to all who sip from it. Everyone loves starting an MD project that siphons data in. But the second people have to manage the data inside and start cleansing it and making decisions - it falls in a heap. It rarely gets to the stage where data is then written back to source systems it's game over (LOLOLOL many a vendor I have left in the dust just asking them about this - "That's phase 2" they say - and they've never had any single customer reach it). -- Back on point about the article though, it looks like an interesting way to structure data and it could probably do as an Excel add-on of some kind. I expected something that would create a database but unless there's more than the video this is just writing queries? This is all well and fine, I guess, if it adds usability. But nobody's jobs are going anywhere. The article says this tool can create anything SQL-92 can. Good luck... I deal with shit daily that you couldn't even begin to imagine.