Grow Your Business Effectively Using Data Modeling in Bold BI
Many businesses struggle to understand the true structure of their data, making it difficult to find proper solutions to their problems and achieve a variety of goals. This affects the growth and success of the business because decision-makers cannot access the information they need to make data-driven, well-informed decisions. The use of data modeling in business allows business operators to have a clear view of the company’s data by giving them a clear visual representation of it. Furthermore, data modeling analyzes and defines the different types of data the business uses, and how the data interact with each other. Using this analysis, managers can better understand data unique to departments and shared between them, enabling managers to implement helpful changes that improve the performance of both their organization and employees.
Bold BI improves the collection process and analysis involved in data modeling, promoting better organizational decision-making.
In this blog, I am going to talk about:
- What is data modeling?
- Why should you use data modeling?
- Types of data models
- Benefits of data modeling
- How Bold BI helps you model data
What is data modeling?
Data modeling is the process of defining all the different types of data an organization collects and how that data relates to one another to provide a clear explanation of the overall structure of the organization’s data. In a business, it helps leaders comprehend the representation of their data objects and the associations among different data objects. With a clearly defined data model, leaders have assurances about the quality, accuracy, and accessibility of the data they need to help them make quick business decisions as they pursue their business targets.
Why should you use data modeling?
Many organizations use data modeling to ensure all their data is properly stored and accurately represented. This helps them produce business intelligence reports without errors. Data modeling helps any business in the following ways:
- Work faster
- Reduce costs
- Mitigate risk
- Improve business processes
Work faster
Data modeling empowers teams to deliver projects and products to market faster. This is achieved as a result of a data model’s clearly defined structures for data and the relationships between different data sets. The division between a company’s IT team and its business team is made smaller. When teams know where and how its data is presented, it knows how to work with it immediately. Even as the amount of data collected by a business grows, the data model reins in the data to keep it quickly usable.
Reduce costs
Data modeling helps reduce costs by establishing data processes that can be easily referenced and followed. Teams aren’t left scrambling to figure out how to extract the data they need in the right format or how to track down the data in the first place. Data operations and transactions are smooth and predictable. This efficiency saves the business both time and money.
Mitigate risk
Using data modeling, a company can proactively address risk exposure, whether it involves of a particular data set, a project, multiple projects, or the business as a whole. A sound data model reduces errors. By analyzing the risks, the company has the ability to develop strategies and even modify or implement new data models to mitigate current and future risks.
Improve business processes
With data modeling, you can understand all data processes in your business. With that understanding, you can discover new ways of improving your business operations. Such improvements can have minor impacts like improving team efficiency, or significant impacts like helping achieve major business goals. When one goal is achieved, you can elevate it to pursue better results in the future.
Types of data models
Let’s see some of the important types of data modeling.
Conceptual data modeling
Conceptual data modeling is a type of data modeling that outlines the big picture of a business and its data. Conceptual modeling helps business leaders analyze their data setup to ensure it meets the needs of the company. Knowing how data is structured and shared helps leaders identify where the model could be improved to better serve business needs.
Logical data modeling
Logical data modeling shows the relationships between particular attributes of data within different entities and their impacts to the business. This type of data modeling gives you insights into different activities taking place in each department and their contribution to the business.
Physical data modeling
This type of data model is the implementation of the conceptual and logical data model designs. In this type of data modeling, you spell out how databases will be created in your organization by developers and database administrators.
Benefits of data modeling
Let’s explore some of the benefits of data modeling in an organization:
- Ensures high performance
- Improves data quality
- Promotes data intelligence
- Enhances data governance
Ensures high performance
Data modeling gives everyone in a company a better understanding of its databases. This leads to high performance because the model provides an outline of how different challenges can be approached, giving IT and business teams the ability to create an end data product that maximizes benefit and value to the organization. This improves the work conducted in the current project and future challenges. Furthermore, data modeling eliminates redundant work throughout the organization.
Improves data quality
Data modeling helps simplify data to the point that it can be easily understood and used in reports and business intelligence analysis. Data produced and collected according to the model meets the specified quality and structure requirements, allowing the organization to leverage it precisely as needed. By making proper use of the database, information is extracted from storage and put to work.
Promotes data intelligence
Data modeling promotes data intelligence, leading to the identification of new patterns in the market. This helps managers make predictions about their business to navigate new and not-yet-realized opportunities. This motivates the organization to continue investing in data modeling as a foundational aspect of its data strategy. Though data modeling is a planning-intensive task, the benefits derived from it continue to grow with the company, even as data models evolve over time.
Enhances data governance
Data modeling enhances data governance by clearly illustrating how data is organized, created, collected, retained, and used. Data owners, stewards, and others tasked with enforcing company data governance policies rely on the data model to perform their duties. Working together, modeling and governance provide businesses with better and cleaner data to analyze, which enables managers to make better business decisions. With the correct data analysis in hand, they can pursue profit growth with confidence.
How Bold BI helps you model data
With Bold BI, data analysts can easily connect to various data sources to enable data modeling features like filtering and joining that allow users to visualize data and see its trends. This facilitates better decision-making in businesses, thus improving organizational workflows and operational performance without any high knowledge or technical requirements. To learn more about data modeling operations supported in Bold BI and how they help harness the power of your data, refer to this blog.
Key features of Bold BI relevant to data modeling
Data visualization
Embed data visualizations into your applications and websites to streamline data comprehension and communication. Visualizations let you analyze data, discuss it, and use it to enforce your arguments when making important decisions. Being able to do all of this not only puts your data modeling skills to use, but also further develops them.
Data preparation
Bold BI allows you to combine data from hundreds of data sources, including any data warehouse of your choice, and transform it to your needs.
Data connectivity
You can connect to different data sources to enrich your work. Bold BI supports files from various sources, databases, warehouses, and big data integrations — wherever your data modeling framework states data must be stored.
Data security
Bold BI is precise when it comes to the safety of your data. Your data is under your complete control. Manage and grant access to users by configuring access settings and authenticating any new user. You can also integrate your security infrastructure seamlessly.
Intuitive widgets
Bold BI’s rich set of built-in widgets and custom widget capabilities give you the power to extract deep insights from your data. Use interactive features such as filters, drill down, drill through, customizable tooltips, linking, and more to tell the story hidden in your data.
Designed for embedding
Bold BI allows you to collaborate with your colleagues on data analytics within your website or application. Bold BI’s embedding capabilities include frame embedding, JavaScript embedding, and white labelling. Setting up Bold BI within your enterprise means you can stay within any data modeling boundaries.
To learn more about Bold BI and its variety of features, refer to this link.
Conclusion
I hope you now have a better understanding of data modeling and how business intelligence promotes data modeling activities.
Bold BI helps you visualize your data to see all your important metrics and KPIs in real time. It helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. You’ll save time by avoiding redundant work. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our documentation. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on September 19, 2022.
