How to Find the Data Gold Hidden Across Your Business

First the good news: At this very moment, there is hidden data query and data prep gold throughout your organization, just waiting for you to come along and claim it. When you do, you can use it to leverage all of the best practices and best thinking among your fellow data analyst and data preparation teams across the company — so you can streamline your workflow, produce the top-quality datasets your colleagues need, and deliver them faster and with less effort.

Now the bad news: With your organization’s existing processes, accessing this wealth of company knowledge is indeed like panning for gold. Maybe you’ll find it; maybe you won’t. Either way, you’ll have to invest a lot of time and energy trying.

So how do we get you, and all of your colleagues, to discover that gold?

In a recent post, I promised to discuss several ways that Toad Intelligence Central, a collaborative environment within Toad, can make Toad Data Point and all of your Toad products more valuable to everyone on your team who deals with data analytics.

One way Toad Intelligence Central can add massive value is by allowing all Toad users across your company to share their files — connectivity details, relationship diagrams, import/export templates, queries, automation templates, data cleansing routines, etc — in a centralized Toad environment. In fact, you can think of Toad Intelligence Central as a Toad collaboration server.

Here’s an example of how that can turn your company’s years worth of valuable data elements scattered across departments and machines… into a cohesive, single-point-of-access goldmine of data analyst and self-service data preparation best practices.

Leverage Your Team’s Best Data Analytics Work — on Every Project

Let’s say your VP of marketing asks you for a dataset merging a specific product’s sales numbers over the last two quarters with a series of marketing campaigns run during the same timeframe for that product.

You’re not so comfortable accessing these disparate systems and writing the complex query code yourself, so you have a couple of options for pulling these data together for your VP.

First, you ask the SQL coding genius in your department. But he’s too busy. Next, you search your team’s SharePoint site for the closest possible query that you can modify with as little tweaking as possible. Nothing usable here. Finally, you scan your old emails for snippets of query code that might give you a head start. No luck.

So in the end you’re forced to build this query on your own — and it’s going to take time. The frustrating thing is, you know that a fellow data analyst somewhere in your company has already built this, or something extremely similar, and that this elegant template is out there somewhere in your organization. If you could find it, you could use it to save serious time and effort on this task. You just don’t know where to look or whom to ask.

This is where Toad Intelligence Central comes in.

With this collaborative server built right into your Toad app, you could simply browse all of the previous queries, templates, databases and other files created by your colleagues across the company. You could search by file name, date range, tags, keywords or a host of other criteria. Chances are, you’d find similar base queries written by fellow analysts — and you could review them and choose the most relevant for your purposes.

No more having to leave the Toad app and send emails, call coworkers, or search through other sites and drives.

No more recreating the wheel each time because you and the other data analysts across the business are all effectively operating in Toad silos.

And no more losing valuable learnings hidden in those silos because the Toad users throughout your company don’t have an effective mechanism to share with each other their hard-earned knowledge and best practices.

With Toad Intelligence Central deployed across your Toad architecture, you and your team can all leverage the domain expertise currently locked away in individual machines and unshared drives. You’ll give every data analyst professional the timesaving ability to access all proven Toad elements, rather than having to create them again on their own.

And best of all for your business’s bottom line: With Toad Intelligence Central, you’ll turn every Toad user into a power user.

I’ll continue to offer examples of the benefits of adding Toad Intelligence Central to your Toad workflow.

But in the meantime, I recommend you try the full-featured product for yourself.

Comments or questions?  Feel free to reach out to me directly at julie.hyman@quest.com