What is Collaborative Analytics?
Ok, so you’re walking across the beach with your competitive Spikeball team as the sun is starting to set. Tummies are rumbling after a hard-fought victory, and everyone is ready to find some food for dinner. You pull out your phone, instinctively tap Google Maps™ and type in “food”, resulting in a slew of red dots all around your current location, which you start announcing to the group to some mixed reactions.
But then your teammate, Bob, cuts you off, reminding you that he’s gluten-free and he’s already filtered his Yelp™ app down to places he can eat. Then Anna chimes in that she needs to be home by 8, so it has to be relatively close, ideally in the direction of her house. And Ricky doesn’t want to spend too much since he’s saving up to get his MBA.
Within a couple of minutes, using multiple different tools and across different people with different requirements, you have filtered and narrowed your choices from hundreds down to just a couple of options, on which you can easily reach a consensus.
This is collaborative analytics. Granted, it’s a small and simple example of collaborative analytics, but the principles are the same. A group of individuals with a common goal use technology, data, and communication to reach an actionable conclusion. A delicious conclusion. And technically, you don’t need technology to participate in collaborative analytics — technically crossing the street with a friend is a collaborative analytics experience — but modern technologies really help to harness and nurture our collaborative capabilities. Being able to share a session with a teammate, whether it’s one of your peers, your junior analysts, or even your boss, is going to be critical to sharing information, and more importantly, creating new insights that you may have missed. After all, two heads are better than one, as they say, and that applies double for creative processes and workflows like data analysis.
Here’s where we get to the tiny product plug about Knarr, a collaborative analytics tool designed to enable individuals and teams to do rapid analytics prototyping. Our team at Knarr saw that while there are many collaborative tools for things like design, coding, music, even productivity like Google Sheets™, there were very few tools, if any, that really focus on creating an immersive collaborative analytics experience that pushes teams to get to insights quickly. So, we built one, and you can get more information (and sign up for the alpha) at https://knarr.io.
Even if you’re not going to use Knarr as your analytics tool, collaboration is here to stay, and tools that you’re looking to invest in should have some kind of collaboration capability: it is paramount to success in Analytics.
Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn to learn more about our philosophy on collaboration in analytics.
-Jerry
