Data discovery is becoming a new way to look at analytics through interactive reports and explorable data from multiple sources. The benefit of data discovery is that you can empower non-technical users with the ability to experiment, play and create dynamic, easy to use reports in a short period of time without having to involve IT, while protecting themselves from what they don’t know by having governed facts and metrics, so the things they are creating are accurate, but they can’t get themselves into trouble.
Data discovery helps to bridge the gap between business & IT, since IT is not always wanting to respond to all requests made, and the business doesn’t have to wait for IT to build it. Having a tool that will manage and measure the governed side of things allows both departments to run smoothly.
With the tools and users ability to do self-service and create visualizations on the fly insights can be drawn in a matter of minutes, which can lead to traditional BI initiatives. Giving users the ability to have governed data discovery, through already created metrics, and for them to use self-service BI can lead to unintended paths of analysis. While ungoverned data can be useful it is really best to have a balance of the two and MicroStrategy allows you to do this.
Whether the data is structured or unstructured giving the ability to interact with data can lead to users identifying and finding insight where they wouldn’t have been able to go with traditional BI. The enablement of the exploration layer can lead to finding or uncovering potential trends within the data. The user may do some ad hoc or one time analysis that leads to further analysis and possibly trial and error until something of value comes across to the end user which alleviates the lead times and effort level for the IT folks.
One tool within MicroStrategy that is great for data discovery is visual insight as it provides some structure and governance at the enterprise level for your data so the user is free to show trends on the data sets by simply plugging and playing.
MicroStategy 10 & desktop make it easy to have a departmental BI environment quickly and without overspending. This can be easily migrated into the enterprise environment.
For information about big data discovery read our big data section here.