Use Case
Answer a Burning Question
Get repeatable answers to your most important business questions
Vision
Is it for me?
For the Business Owner or Senior Executive
Who needs to repeatably get answers to known questions, with data they already have access to
The AgileData “Answer a Burning Question” is a service
That enables you to make data driven decisions quickly and with confidence
Unlike the current gut feel decisions made with no data supporting them
AgileData “Answer a Burning Question” will:
- Collect, combine and present your data so you can use it to make informed decisions;
- Allow you or your team to upload new data to refresh your data insights;
- Generate your data insights as often as you need them;
- Use your own reporting tools, or we can provide Google Data Studio at no cost;
- Provide a fully managed service so you don’t have to worry;
- Keep all your data safe, secure and private;
Common business problems
And how the Answer a Burning Question service solves them
Single list of customers
Often you may want to answer a question based on a single unique list or count of a business concept, for example, customers, suppliers, providers or students.
Example Questions
- How many customers do we have?
- How many suppliers do we buy from?
- How many students do we have enrolled?
- How many providers do we work with?
Typical Challenges
- Customer data is spread across multiple different source systems and needs to be combined to allow a single list of customer’s to be viewed.
- The customer identifiers may not be consistent across the source systems, requiring complex logic to remove duplicates where the same customer has different identifiers in each system.
The AgileData.io Answer a Burning Question combines records from multiple disparate source systems for a business concept, for example customers, to enable you to view or count from a single place.
Single view of customer
Often you may want to answer a question based on combining data from multiple systems to provide a single view of data to answer a question. These single views are often dependent on a single list for a business concept, for example, a single list of customers.
Example Questions
- What was the revenue and expenditure and inventory levels for a customer in December?
- What are my HR and Finance and Sales KPI’s for a sales region?
Typical Challenges
- Customer data is spread across multiple different source systems and needs to be combined to allow a single of information to be viewed.
- Multiple business events, for example, “customer buys product”, “plant manufactures product” and “warehouse ships product” have to be combined to provide the single view.
The AgileData.io Answer a Burning Question combines Concepts, for example Customers and Products across multiple disparate source systems to provide a single view.
Faster Official Information Request (OIA's) Responses
As a Government agency, you have to consistently reply to OIA’s within 20 working days. Often these OIA’s are based on repeatable questions or data that is used repeatably.
Typical Challenges
- The data required to answer the OIA is stored in multiple data sources.
- Your information technology or data teams are too busy to respond to your data request in the timeframe you need.
- You do not have visibility of the questions that have been asked in the past or the answers that have been provided.
The AgileData.io Answer a Burning Question stores all data for all time as History, allowing you to easily recreate the same answer to a previous question.
How it works
Discover your core business questions and processes
Using our magical “who does what” discovery workshop we work with you to quickly identify and agree the core business questions you want to be answered. For example “How many customers do we have”, “Where are they located”, “How much revenue did we make for each customer”.
In the same workshop we gather an understanding of your key business events and concepts, using our Natural Language approach. For example, “Customers Buy Products from an Employee at a Store on any given Weekday”.
This discovery workshop is undertaken remotely and typically involves a couple of hours of your time.
Collect organisational knowledge
You provide us access to the detailed data needed to answer these questions. We have a number of patterns to help make it easy to collect your data in a secure way.
We use AgileData.io to harvest meaning from your data and we have a quick look to gain an understanding of what it contains and how it is structured.
The time it takes to collect this data varies with every customer and source system, as it’s based on the flexibility of your systems and your organisation.
Define business rules
We define data rules using our natural language approach to transform the data from the raw state you provided, to a format that can be used to easily and repeatably answer your question. This may include simple rules such as which data identifies a unique customer, or complex rules, for example, deriving a single (golden) customer record from multiple disparate sets of customer data.
We do the majority of the effort defining these, but your time is needed to help us confirm the rules.
Consume your data
Consume your data using your favourite BI or AI tools, without the need to write complex code or join hundreds of tables
You view the answers to your questions. We iterate on the rules until you are happy with the answer that are being provided by your data.
Your data is updated on a regular basis providing an immediate answer to your business questions.
How it works
A simple process to reduce the complexity of answering your most important questions
Discover your core business questions and processes
Using our magical “who does what” discovery workshop we work with you to quickly identify and agree the core business questions you want to be answered. For example “How many customers do we have”, “Where are they located”, “How much revenue did we make for each customer”.
In the same workshop we gather an understanding of your key business events and concepts, using our Natural Language approach. For example, “Customers Buy Products from an Employee at a Store on any given Weekday”.
This discovery workshop is undertaken remotely and typically involves a couple of hours of your time.
Collect organisational knowledge
You provide us access to the detailed data needed to answer these questions. We have a number of patterns to help make it easy to collect your data in a secure way.
We use AgileData.io to harvest meaning from your data and we have a quick look to gain an understanding of what it contains and how it is structured.
The time it takes to collect this data varies with every customer and source system, as it’s based on the flexibility of your systems and your organisation.
Define business rules
We define data rules using our natural language approach to transform the data from the raw state you provided, to a format that can be used to easily and repeatably answer your question. This may include simple rules such as which data identifies a unique customer, or complex rules, for example, deriving a single (golden) customer record from multiple disparate sets of customer data.
We do the majority of the effort defining these, but your time is needed to help us confirm the rules.
Consume your data
Consume your data using your favourite BI or AI tools, without the need to write complex code or join hundreds of tables
You view the answers to your questions. We iterate on the rules until you are happy with the answer that are being provided by your data.
Your data is updated on a regular basis providing an immediate answer to your business questions.
F.A.Q.
How many users can access the answers?
If you are using your own Business Intelligence, Visualisation or Reporting tool to access the answers, then you can have as many users as your tool can support.
If we are providing easy access to the answers via your web browser then we leverage Google Data Studio which is available to as many users as you require at no additional costs.
If you need advanced BI capabilities, we can recommend a number of cost-effective cloud BI options, such as QlikSense, Tableau and PowerBI that enable multiple users to access the answers. However, these will involve additional costs, to purchase the multi-user licenses of those tools, in addition to our fixed price.
What happens if we want to stop?
If you want to stop using the AgileData.io service at any time, we will decommission your access and permanently delete your data.
We suggest you extract all your data from the consume area before we decommission your access, as once we have deleted it we cannot recover it.
Can we get copies of all your code, so we can replicate it on our platform?
No.
One of the reasons we are able to deliver answers to your questions using your data so quickly is due to the magic we have built under the covers on our platform. As you would expect this is the value of AgileData.io and it would be remiss of us to give this magic away.
However, we will always provide you with copies of your event, concept and detail definitions and the Natural Language change rules we configure for you. With these you could build your own data platform and replicate the data you consume from AgileData.io if you desired.