by Hannah Barrett, on June 27, 2023
What is Self-Service Data Analytics?
I sat down with Jessica Tomapat from Arkatechture to ask her a few questions about self-service data analytics to find out why it's so important. Here's what I learned!
Self-service data analytics is enabled within an organization when a process and technology platform is established that allows users the ability to access, analyze, and derive insights from data without relying on IT or data specialists. It empowers less technically-savvy users to independently explore and manipulate data to discover patterns, trends, and correlations to aid in day-to-day and future decision-making.
Self-service analytics empowers a data-driven culture by empowering users from the data team down to the frontline staff, and really democratizing access. What this does is it makes it so people are more likely to make decisions based on data because they can access that data quickly. When you have the data behind several layers of process, and it's difficult for them to get an answer, users and culture tends to follow the path of least resistance. So users will go make a decision based on gut because that's what gets their decision made the fastest. When you make it so that the users can access that data very quickly, then they are more likely to make that decision based on data."
- Jessica Tomapat, Business Advisory & Product Innovation Lead at Arkatechture
How Does Self-Service Data Analytics Work?
With self-service data analytics, users across departments have access to user-friendly tools and interfaces that enable them to interact with data in a way that is highly intuitive, without the need for complex programming or SQL queries. These tools often include visual, user-friendly interfaces, data exploration features, and pre-built analytical functions. They may also support data cleansing, transformation, and blending, allowing users to prepare the data for analysis without assistance.
With self-service business intelligence, users are given the freedom to generate ad-hoc queries, perform data visualization, create reports and dashboards, and conduct advanced analytics techniques such as predictive modeling or machine learning. This empowers business users to make data-driven decisions independently and quickly, without having to rely on IT departments or data experts.
The Top 4 Benefits of Self-Service Data Analytics
Some key benefits of self-service analytics include:
- Increased Agility
Make day-to-day business decisions quickly and easily on the fly. - Reduced Reliance on IT Resources
Empower your less tech-savvy users so they no longer need to rely on IT departments and data experts in order to make informed decisions. - Faster Time-to-Insights
Up-to-date data at your fingertips daily, ready for analysis and data-driven decisioning. - Better Decision-Making
No more guesswork; make the best possible business decisions daily, big or small, and get everyone on the same page.
So, everyone can be playing off the same sheet of 'music' and answer questions with the same definition. So, what is the open date of a loan? Or, what is the balance of a share? So when they are operating from the same definition, then you can trust that they can leverage a tool like our workbench to ask questions of the data and get their own answers without needing to go through a complicated programing request or burden your data or IT team."
- Jessica Tomapat
(pictured: example of a self-service workbench in action to create custom queries)
Self-Service Data Analytics with Arkalytics
With Arkalytics' self-service data platform, users have access to tools called workbenches that anyone can use to quickly filter and slice conformed data sets, eliminating your backlog of data requests. Members, Transactions, and Loans are just a few subject areas you can start with.
Arkalytics allows users to custom design and build dashboards to fit their own specific needs. Equip your team with a user-friendly interface that helps you answer critical business questions in a fraction of the time.
I think the largest time-savings that comes from self-service data analytics is the time from which the user has the question, to when they have the answer in their hands. So they ask a question like 'how did this loan promotion perform?' Now, they see how it performed overall in the organization by asking a few questions in the workbench."
- Jessica Tomapat
Does pulling reports take your organization hours of time and resources? Download our Self-Service Workbenches One-Pager to share with your team!
