What is Alteryx and how can it benefit you?

Disclaimer: Views are my own.

A guide to help you understand what it is, who can use it and how it can benefit you with examples of use cases as well as looking into whether this should be a concern for IT.

We all have data. Lots of it. We have data on our phones, watches, our TV habits. Companies collect data from visits to their websites, clicks and transactions, people data, finance data — sales and losses, and geographic data too. We have SO much data, everywhere but how do we leverage this data in an effective way? This is where Alteryx comes in.

What is Alteryx Designer and what can it do?

Alteryx Designer is a self-service data analytics software suite, which can perform ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) operations, and some other things like manipulating your data, creating those calculations that you might typically do in Excel, structuring your reports or even using predictive tools to forecast. It has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that makes it intuitive for an ordinary business user because you do not need to be a master coder or from an IT background. It allows you to bring in multiple data sources from different locations, such as files, databases, or APIs. You can bring in structured or unstructured data and prepare, blend, and analyse it. You can then push these outputs into reports like files or charts, back to databases or APIs, or share the process you built through Alteryx Server.

These workflows can save users a lot of time, as they can allow you to carry out many of your repeatable processes on a regular basis. You may have previously created a report on a quarterly basis, manually calculating and changing the shape of your data to fit a report. By creating a workflow in Alteryx Designer, you would need to replace your input and hit run which would give you back all the time that you spent on manual laborious tasks.

Alteryx Server is the icing on top of the cake.

The use of Alteryx Server in conjunction with Designer allows you to schedule your workflows on a quarterly, monthly, daily or basis that suits your needs best. The use of a Server makes it easy to organise your workflows, share and collaborate. There are further benefits with ways to manage database connections, maintain version control and control user permissions. Connecting directly to the data allows you to minimise risk and features in Alteryx Designer can help retain the accuracy of your data.

Who can use it?

Anybody! That is the beauty of Alteryx in that it empowers the ordinary business user to become an analyst. Excel is not a bad tool, but personally, I have noticed that it is often used in ways that are very unproductive. Whatever department you work in, there’s a use case for you. Let’s look at some examples:

Marketing and HR

• Teams deal with a lot of personal data that is either unstructured or inconsistent.
• Gathering and organising e-mail addresses, contact details and personal information. Often due to methods of collection, there is no consistency.
• Multiple locations in which this data is stored so it is hard to find what you need.

Potential Alteryx Solutions:

• You can connect to multiple sources of data in Alteryx Designer.
• You can reorganise and bring the data together.
• You can clean this data by using cleaning steps to remove trailing spaces and replace nulls by simply checking some boxes within a tool.
• You can use tools to replace certain parts of the data.
• You can split out data, e.g. you may only want the first part before the @ sign of an e-mail address? Use Text to Columns and split on the delimiter of the @.

Financial Reporting

• Teams need to create reports every quarter.
• Collecting financial data from different places, creating and pasting tables into Excel. Creating some charts to support this.
• Creating vlookups, pivot tables and carrying out calculations and manipulations in Excel as your client wants different tables output to Powerpoint.
• Creating and presenting Excel Dashboards.

Potential Alteryx Solutions:

• Bring in data from different sources and combine it with ease.
• No need to copy and paste files together to create whole sources. Instead, you can read all of them in and can blend different columns from multiple datasets as you need to, not just one at a time.
• Use tools to change the shape of your data to pivot certain columns so that you have them as rows, or to create new column headers from rows.
• You can create multiple tables from the single data input. Rather than screenshotting every cateogory into a powerpoint, you can generate all of the charts at once, straight to powerpoint.
• You can generate the same reports that you once did but through Alteryx instead. You can create and add supporting charts and you can combine any grids with these charts with tools that allow you to piece your different sections together. The Reporting tools allow you to carry out lots of formatting giving you the flexibility to meet your requirements.
• You could use Alteryx Server to schedule this to run quarterly. The team can be added to the collection where the workflow is and can export the output for themselves without changing the workflow.

Office/ Store Growth

• The need to open a new office/ store but want to ensure that this is in a suitable location.
• The need to cater to employees far and wide if it is a new office location, close to tube/ train/ bus stations and well connected. There needs to be enough around for them to get food.
• If it is a new store, similar things matter such as connectedness. Is it close to any landmarks?
• How far is this store or office from other stores or offices?

Potential Alteryx Solutions:

• The spatial tools in Alteryx are very flexible and can help you carry out this kind of analysis and ask and answer any questions.
• You can plot different kinds of analysis and then layer them on top of one another by joining them back together, creating a radius and measuring distance.

Here is an example of a real Alteryx use case where Chris Hutchinson from the company TravelTime used Alteryx to get employees back to work post-Covid-19:

Using Alteryx to help get employees back to work post Covid-19

Alteryx has a bank of real stories and use cases:

Alteryx Use Cases

You will realise very quickly that you can use Alteryx Designer for simple or complex requirements. including the use of data science and predictive tools. It is a very agile and flexible tool allowing for collaboration and sharing whilst being very secure.

Is this a concern for IT?

I have found that, it depends on how you position Alteryx within your organisation. In any case, it should not really be a concern if you can find the balance between IT and business users. Alteryx democratises data analytics, and it does this really well. The use cases shared by businesses prove this. A lot of manipulations, and manual processes are already being carried out by business users and arguably, this is much more prone to human error and very time-consuming. Removing a manual process can be beneficial to business users but also removes any possibility for error which IT may be afraid of. A standardised approach might take some time to set up, but once up and running, it becomes robust and means that little to no time would be spent on that particular area of work. Time is money and more time returned, means investing it into more work, or the right places that should be worthy of it.

There are a number of organisations that seem to have adopted the use of Alteryx in different ways, some empowering their business users to become the analyst, whilst others allowing the developers to use it as a tool for a quicker start-to-end process and accelerate development.

JP Morgan Chase & Co is a very corporate organization with strict IT practices. They have shared their story about enabling Alteryx at a massive enterprise scale. This is what they say that things looked like before Alteryx:

‘The way we used to approach analytics was very hands-on, but there was a disconnect between the business person who needed to use data to make better decisions and the employees that worked with the data.’

JPMorgan Chase & Co's Journey to Enable Alteryx at a Massive Enterprise Scale

I recommend reading more in the article above if you are interested.

Hopefully, this has given a simple introduction to what Alteryx is, how it can be used and whether this should be a concern for IT or not. Having used Alteryx in different environments in different capacities, I have seen firsthand how impactful it can be and how many benefits it can hold.