We’ve seen a monumental shift in the way we collect, store, process and analyze data. The first video in Trifacta’s new series The Data School with Professor Joe Hellerstein, looks at the why, how, and what of the digital transformation taking place before our eyes, and introduces the series which will be an ongoing educational resource for professionals who work with data, people who work with data systems, and managers who define data strategies.

Let’s Start With Why

Why are organizations focused on utilizing new strategies to leverage data? It’s all about growth. In times past, data was used to measure historical performance–looking at trends over time and measuring changes in performance. Organizations mostly leveraged business data and customer transactions data housed in a centrally managed enterprise data warehouse (EDW). While this is still useful today, focusing only on historical trends leads businesses to be reactive with their data, often missing opportunities to innovate and predict the direction of the market.

Organizations now have access to far more information from third party data, IOT data, public data, and more. Organizations that can successfully utilize this data for predictive functions can anticipate future business challenges, innovate over their competition, and drive business growth. Additionally, organizations can leverage these broader sources of data to measure product usage patterns and make improvements to product development, or can provide suggestions for customers to improve customer experience. The applications of using data to improve business performance are boundless. All of this new opportunity has led to massive investment in new technologies around data and analytics, but in order to extract value from the data, it needs to be properly prepared and refined for it’s downstream use.

It’s a well known problem that 80% or more of any data and analytics project is spent preparing and wrangling the data. In this series of videos, we will take a look at the changes that have occurred over the years in data and analytics with a special emphasis on innovations to data wrangling technology. You will learn best practices around Data Ops and the data analytics lifecycle, and we will discuss how all of this can benefit you and your organization. Take a look at the full video from Trifacta!