This Week in Data Preparation (June 29, 2020)
9 links in this week’s post: 2 opinion articles (on data governance and on using historical data to predict the future), 1 report (on two companies’ approaches to data democratization), 1 IDC survey sponsored by Qlik, 1 capital raise announcement (by Element), 1 acquisition (Dotmatics acquires Biobright), and 3 company announcements (by Collibra, Databricks, and Information Builders).
Designing data governance that delivers value. “Data governance is critical to capturing value through analytics, digital, and other transformative opportunities. While many companies struggle to get it right, every company can succeed by shifting its mindset from thinking of data governance as frameworks and policies to embedding it strategically into the way the organization works every day.” the authors claim in this article for McKinsey.
How to use ‘smart’ data to predict the future of travel. Jeremy Bowen, CEO of travel industry data and analytics company Cirium, talks about how ‘smart’ data forecasts trends and accurately predicts the future of travel, in this article for Globetrender.
How these tech companies democratized their data. In this article, two companies, Pangea and Narrative Science share their views on data democratization.
- At Pangea, data democratization is so ingrained in the company culture that technical employees aren’t the only ones creating dashboards in Looker. In a company-wide effort to democratize data at Pangea, leadership assigned product and engineering teams the responsibility of tool selection and development. Chandana Anand, a senior business manager, said that employees in marketing, customer experience and finance were then empowered to leverage and build upon the data models.
- At Narrative Science, employees use the data storytelling company’s product Lexio to better serve customers. Everyone in the company has access to Lexio, not just the executive team. That means the entire company has access to all of the data and stories about company performance. According to CEO Stuart B. Frankel, Lexio “allows anyone who needs access to information to ask questions and get answers in plain English.”.
IDC survey, sponsored by Qlik, shows strong relationship between optimizing data pipelines and business value. “Even in these challenging economic times, CEOs at major enterprises are continuing to invest in their data pipelines to close the gaps and enable their organizations with more high quality and valuable data for decisions,” said Dan Vesset, Group Vice President, Analytics and Information Management at IDC.
Element raises $18 million to enable data-driven transformation of industrial enterprises. “The funding will help Element achieve the next level of performance on behalf of our customers who are solving their most challenging problems through data.” said Andy Bane, CEO of Element.
Dotmatics acquires Biobright to accelerate laboratory data automation for the lab of the future. “Through complementary technologies, shared scientific expertise and industry insight, we will dramatically accelerate Dotmatics’ ability to innovate and drive lab data automation.” commented Dr Stephen Gallagher, co-founder and CEO at Dotmatics. “Companies that own the cleanest, best-annotated data will be the most successful in making ground-breaking discoveries within this new paradigm.” added Charles Fracchia, co-founder and CEO at BioBright.
Collibra unveils first-ever data intelligence cloud. “By adopting a platform approach to data intelligence, businesses can take advantage of a 360-degree view of their data landscape, enabling them to better understand where the data is, where it came from, what it means and how to use it appropriately as they collaborate and innovate with data for competitive advantage in the digital economy,” said Stewart Bond, director of data integration and data intelligence software research at IDC.
Databricks unveils Delta Engine, acquires Redash. Data warehouses alone don’t cut it. Data lakes alone don’t cut it either. So whether you call it data lakehouse or by any other name, you need the best of two worlds, says Databricks. In the press release, Databricks announced two significant additions to its Unified Data Analytics Platform: Delta Engine, a high-performance query engine on cloud data lakes, and Redash, an open-source dashboarding and visualization service for data scientists and analysts to do data exploration.
Information Builders re-brands to IBI, launches new analytic features. The announcements were made at the company’s Virtual Summit 2020 by CEO Frank Vella. In a statement about the news, Vella said: “We’re on a mission to prepare organizations for the future by turning them into information builders.”.
Thank you for taking the time to read our weekly post with news items from the data preparation market.
