Not everyone has the same level of technical expertise, and it can be easy to get intimidated by the processes and seemingly never-ending nuances of data science. Getting bogged down on necessary but tedious tasks — or complex ones in which you don’t have expertise — can consume valuable time.
Outlined in this blog are a few of the many ways in which Dataiku can help business analysts access, wrangle, blend, transform, and explore data. The efficient process management enabled by Dataiku salvages time for analysts that can be dedicated instead to preeminent project goals such as deriving insights and developing recommendations.
Take, for example, the business analysts at Standard Chartered Bank that simultaneously discovered freedom and enhanced structure around processes for their business environment through Dataiku. Just a year into their journey with Dataiku, Standard Chartered Bank now uses Dataiku to feed dashboards for all the bank’s finances and increased analyst productivity by a factor of 30. They have also been able to develop an organization-wide data marketplace; useful data is right on hand for analysts to leverage in order to effectively solve problems and smoothly navigate day-to-day decision processes.
Keep It Simple; Connect to Data
Cleaning, mining, and monitoring data quickly become a complex and heavily involved process when you have diverse datasets. Expansive data access matters, which is why from Excel to data stored in the cloud, it is all welcome and easy to dive into with Dataiku. Dataiku allows you to pull data from multiple sources and even different formats, yet displays all data as tables with a familiar row and column structure. Familiar but agile. It doesn’t get much better than that.
So, what’s the catch? Well, there isn’t one.
The Dataiku structure has no size limitations and no source limitations. Additionally, Dataiku covers the entirety of the data pipeline! The whole data process can be precisely managed from start-to-finish in a simple and speedy manner.
Make it Easy; Prep Your Data
Dataiku’s, graphical, point-and-click interface is incredibly user-friendly. Uncomplicated visual recipes you can use to clean, filter, join, and aggregate data exist right at your fingertips. As a user, you create a custom flow: a convenient visual setup that shows data transformations (and any machine learning applied) step by step.
Once you’ve connected to data, you may want to explore it to figure out if it aligns with your expectations. For example, empty cells or values above a certain maximum may indicate you have some issues that need to be resolved. With data quality indicators for each column, as well as data quality rules that can easily be set up for each dataset, you can quickly find, and then fix, issues with your data.
After gathering all of your relevant data, there are extensive possibilities with Dataiku to enrich data findings: string transformations, numeric manipulation, geospatial enrichment, etc. You will be able to leverage all these various functions, but Dataiku also makes things even easier through inference assistance and smart pattern building. No advanced coding, engineering, or extensive training background is necessary!
Plus, with Dataiku's AI Prepare assistant, analysts can simply describe the transformation they want to apply and the AI assistant automatically generates the necessary preparation steps. The ability to modify both the prompt and the resulting steps means that analysts can prepare data faster than ever, yet still stay in complete control. This Generative AI-powered feature breaks down the last barriers between knowing what needs to be done and making it happen in enterprise databases and cloud environments. AI Prepare is now available in limited preview.
All code, some code, or no code — you get to choose. If coding sounds overwhelming or out of your comfort zone, there is no need to worry; Dataiku includes 100 code-free transformations that tackle the simplest to the most complex data wrangling tasks.
Now You Get the Picture
After using Dataiku to prepare and transform your datasets, visualizing the results is as easy as a few clicks. You can share output data with BI solutions, like Tableau and Power BI, or you can interactively build charts on any table in your custom flow and publish those charts on the dashboard. You always have easy access to understandable, explorable resources from which you can derive meaningful insights.
You will quickly see that results which previously took hours upon hours to reach in spreadsheets can be reached in a highly efficient manner with Dataiku. Where spreadsheets’ size and functionality limitations hold you back, Dataiku offers you the opportunity for not only more power but also increased documentation and transparency into all actions taken upon the data, which makes it easier to share and collaborate with your team. In case you aren’t convinced of the Dataiku advantage, in this guidebook you can find further explanations of the difference between Excel and Dataiku and all the benefits of transitioning.
As you may already know and dread, reporting projects usually require intense repetition of tasks like loading and processing data; Dataiku has your solution. Let's say on a recurring report, you would like to reuse the custom flow you already crafted, just on the more recent data. Go ahead! Scenarios, the scheduler function of Dataiku, lets you set up an automatic refresh of flows, outputs, and dashboards on either a regular schedule or in a dynamic fashion flexible to your specific needs.
When it comes to project reuse, you can easily both find past projects, and reuse them by duplicating all or part of a project. Features like project wikis, tags, and workspaces make it easy to quickly understand project goals and share with team members.
Another benefit to reap: communicating findings to teams at large has never been easier. Dataiku’s visual applications serve up on-demand results to look at final datasets and interactive dashboards that are easy for business users to interact with and are perfect for reporting purposes.
★★★★★
Best tool to enable all areas to be more data-driven. Dataiku helped to democratize data processing and analytics through the whole company, specifically for non-engineering teams. Easy to use, fast learning curve, great performance."
— Head of Technology in the Finance Industry (Source: Gartner Peer Insights)
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