Are You Giving Your Data Analysts the Tools to Work Like a Team?

If your data analyst or data preparation teams are like most, chances are your organization is producing and sharing a lot of data in different output formats that cannot be easily tracked. This means you never have full visibility into the amount of requests your team is handling, or insight into how, as a team, they could be handling those requests more efficiently.

Even worse: You also lack visibility into how — or even if — anyone is using the data that your teams are so diligently working to produce.

The good news, though, is that we can fix this — easily. I’ll explain how in a moment. (If you can’t wait, click here.) For now, though, let’s consider how all of this data-output chaos can cause real problems across your team.

Let’s say your group produces customer-related reports for various departments within your company. One key piece of this data is the contract start-date for each customer. Because of the way the data comes in, often this date needs to be calculated by the data analyst producing the report.

Now let’s say a new policy at your company calls for a change to the way these start-dates are recorded. So here’s the question: How would you ensure that every person on your team received this change and modified all of their outputs accordingly?

I’m guessing you’d answer with one of the following — “by email,” “manually working with each data analyst,” or “just waiting to see if customers complain that their start-dates are inaccurate, and dealing with it then.” If any one of these are the case for your organization, let me suggest a better solution.

Create a Shared, Collaborative Environment for Your Data Analyst and Data Prep Teams — With Centralized, Curated Datasets

By adding Toad Intelligence Central to your organization’s Toad Data Point infrastructure, you can turn your silo-based analysts into a real team. In our example above, the organization could be working with a curated dataset that had all of the important customer-related calculations, including the start-date. When a change was called for, it could be handled in a single place — within the shared Toad Intelligence Central environment — and automatically reflected in all of your data analysts’ reports.

In previous posts, I’ve discussed some of the huge benefits of adding Toad Intelligence Central to your business intelligence infrastructure: leveraging all of the best practices and domain knowledge for your entire data prep team, and ensuring your company’s data automations and other workflows never fail.

But this sharing of curated datasets might be where Toad Intelligence Central can add the most value to your business.

That’s because, with this collaborative environment accessible to all analysts across your team, everyone will be operating from the same, shared Toad Intelligence Central server, and never from a data silo.

If I’ve convinced you that it’s worth considering complementing your business’s Toad architecture with Toad Intelligence Central, please try the full-featured product for yourself. If you’d like more convincing, or just a robust discussion about Toad and business intelligence, contact me anytime at Julie.Hyman@quest.com.