Use Case
Automate the Dross
Automate repeating data tasks to free up your analysts
Vision
Is it for me?
For the Executive, Founder or Team Leader
Who needs to free up their analysts so they can do more analysis to discover better insights
The AgileData “Automate the Dross” is a service
That automates the collection, combining, validation and consumption of data
Unlike the current ongoing manual analyst effort, or cobbled together IT solution
AgileData “Automate the Dross” will:
- Automate the collection, combining and presentation of your data;
- Refresh your data insights as often as you need them;
- Work with your current Visualisation and Analytics tools;
- 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 Automate the Dross service solves them
Free up your analyst's time
Your analyst team are awesome and keep adding value to business stakeholders by finding more and more uses for the data you have. But as they create more and more code to leverage this data, they also have to maintain and operate it themselves.
Typical Challenges
- This “BAU Bleed” is resulting in the analysts spending more time managing this code than analysing the data to find more insight;
- At the beginning of the month the entire analyst team are spending the first couple of days running code and validating the results, rather than responding to new stakeholder questions;
- All the knowledge of where the code lives and what it does is in a single analysts head.
Improve your ad-hoc process
Your analyst team are awesome and each time they are asked for new data or insights they create some quick code or manual process to deliver it. But as they create more and more of these the processes are becoming cumbersome and often failing due to the ad-hoc nature of the development.
Typical Challenges
- This “BAU Bleed” is resulting in the analysts spending more time managing these processes rather than responding to new questions from stakeholder;
- Executive reports and dashboards have a large number of moving parts to produce them and some of the parts often fall over on a regular basis;
- The analysts that created the code have left and the new analysts are struggling to find any documentation and understand what the codes does and why, introducing risk the code maybe run in the wrong order or a step missed and the wrong results published;
- Excel is starting to struggle with the volume of the data being pushed through it;
- The code is all on a single analysts desktop, with no versions and no real backups.
Decommission your legacy technology platform
Your current and data and code is running on old legacy technology that is no longer supported. You need to move it to a new platform.
Typical Challenges
- The estimates you have been provided to acquire new software and infrastructure is in the hundred of thousand of dollars;
- The estimated timeframe to stand up the new platform is in the months;
- The estimated of effort to recreate the code you have to the new platform is in months;
- You have been told you need a new team to administer this new platform.
Improve performance
Your current and data and code is starting to take too long to run, and you can no longer meet your stakeholder expectations of when you will get the data and insights to them. You need to do something to get the run times down to an acceptable level.
Typical Challenges
- Your IT team are saying they will need to buy and implement an entire new technology stack or platform to enable your code to run faster;
- The estimates you have been provided to acquire new software and infrastructure is in the hundred of thousand of dollars;
- The estimated timeframe to stand up the new platform is in the months;
- The estimated of effort to recreate the code you have to the new platform is in months;
- You have been told you need a new team to administer this new platform.
How it works
A simple process to automate the manual effort your analysts do
Discover your core business questions and processes
Using our magical “who does what” discovery workshop we work with you to quickly identify the core business questions your analysts currently answer for you. 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 and code your analysts are currently using.
We use AgileData.io to harvest meaning from your data and code 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 create data that achieves the same outcome as your analysts code.
We do the majority of the effort defining these, but your analysts time is needed to help us confirm the rules.
Consume your data
Repoint your BI or AI content, to use the new data that is presented by AgileData.io.
Your data is updated on a regular basis automating the effort that your analysts are currently doing manually.
How it works
A simple process to automate the manual effort your analysts do
Discover your core business questions and processes
Using our magical “who does what” discovery workshop we work with you to quickly identify the core business questions your analysts currently answer for you. 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 and code your analysts are currently using.
We use AgileData.io to harvest meaning from your data and code 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 create data that achieves the same outcome as your analysts code.
We do the majority of the effort defining these, but your time is needed to help us confirm the rules.
Consume your data
Repoint your BI or AI content, to use the new data that is presented by AgileData.io
Your data is updated on a regular basis automating the effort that your analysts are currently doing manually.
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.