Data Utopia. The last mile of data analytics.

Data is becoming more accessible. Every action on the web is tracked. Computing and storage costs are lower than ever before. Data centers are in the cloud. Hadoop, machine learning and data scientists have allowed us to reduce big data into insightful chunks which is starting the transformation of many digital enterprises into data-driven enterprises.

But data analytics needs to go further. From siloed and hard to access to data at our finger tips and answer-ready. The innovation in data has to progress beyond big data computing technologies and sexy data visualizations to data democratization across organizational ranks.

Modern data analytics solutions must ensure speed of data access, deliver ad-hoc data to front line business users, present guided opportunities vs. raw excels, embed business workflows with high frequency testing capabilities that close the feedback and ROI loop.

These modern analytics solutions will result in disintermediation of BI and cause data to move freely in decentralized yet governed environments. That last mile of data convergence will have a real and recurring impact on influencing multiple operational and optimization decisions that enterprises routinely make.

There are several companies building this last mile of data analytics.

Analytics as intuitive as Google search.

ThoughtSpot has invented a google like search interface that allows business users to ask questions using natural language queries and get instant answers without having to wait for asynchronous, lagged request-response method of securing reports via the BI/IT teams.

While legacy BI programs delivered reports with some guided analysis, companies like ThoughtSpot are enabling natural-form, time critical, self-service analysis built to handle rapid pace of change, exploding data volume and complexity. Self service analytics dramatically improves business user’s degrees of freedom by taking out the dependency on other teams.

Role-first analytics.

BloomReach is inventing the paradigm of Role-First, Role-Aware analytics. Role-First solutions exhibit extreme empathy for the business user, present insights in their business language, embed the support for ad-hoc and cyclical workflows, push high impact opportunities, and allow action orchestration, testing and feedback.

Role-First solutions are built for data-novices and are as much about about subtraction of data and reporting noise as elevation of key insights. They are also team-aware and facilitate collaboration and communication around data and reports.

Outlier-centric monitoring.

Machines monitoring machines, learning patterns and typically assisted and augmented with human intuition. They go beyond deterministic rules based programming and use deep learning to detect anomalies.

These technologies include large scale monitoring, intelligent error detection, resolution recommendation with impact prediction and might even go as far as orchestrating the best action on user’s behalf. YotaScale, OpsClarity, Nanit baby monitor et. al. are applying this paradigm in areas as diverse as systems management monitoring to computer vision aided consumer products.

The common thread across these last mile data analytics approaches is more humanized and decentralized analytics. Free data. Open data. Better data.