Business Intelligence is becoming increasingly complex due to the growing demand from business units to view data from multiple channels. This complexity is also magnified by regulatory pressure, competition, and customers who expect more knowledge and insights about products and services they acquire from the sellers.
Business insight no longer comes in the shape of a report that an executive gets every week, but rather in complex systems which trace and monitor data in real time inside and outside immediate business territories. Driving data from multiple sources to a single platform is not new. What is new is the frequency and the delivery intensity by which we extract and load the data to create the intelligence needed to support a single user who wants to know what to change in order to become more relevant in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, it’s not a single linear view of the data that creates insight, but rather a complex integration of data items that create the insights from multiple sources. In this context, regardless of skills or business community, users must have a quick way to determine if reports, analyses, algorithms are readily available.
We also know that the BI budget is never enough to deal with such a problem, and with growing trends to search data on multiple platforms, it is increasingly difficult to manage, track and then present the data back to the users with an additional layer of intelligence.
The Problem
In this unpredictable setting, we see business executives and IT staff constantly searching for sophisticated solutions to make more with less. The BI field is driven by competition and fueled by numerous tools and methodologies attempting to make order in this complicated business space. As a result, more time is spent searching than analyzing; which is, of course, wasted time, redundant efforts, and non-productive investment in human capital.
In trying to wrap their heads around the problem and get it under control, IT is actually losing control simply because it doesn’t want to become a barrier to the sophisticated user, who believes that information is the driving engine to success in the marketplace. Moreover, without a strict policy and enforceable guidelines, many organizations find themselves confused and powerless against the growing trends of data propagation.
Fixing IT
So what can you do about metadata management? Metadata is a crucial source of information for business and technical users which has not been well supported in the past. However, today, sophisticated technologies search, capture, manage, and access metadata on multiple platforms with only a few clicks.
Moving forward, organizations must become data-driven which means they must quickly find the right data for each situation and support collaboration between analytically savvy and technologically naïve users so they can share the knowledge about data/analytics throughout the organization.
As BI evolves, we find ourselves facing data warehouse technologies that enable IT to retrieve data from multiple locations and then move it to a database capable of producing reports, dashboards, mobile alerts, etc. Using the same approach, Octopai retrieves metadata from various tools and places them on a centralized cloud platform.
To this end, Octopai revolutionizes the way we treat data and brings a new dimension to the digital age where data from multiple locations can be viewed and accessed from one centralized place. Octopai eliminates manual work completely with an automated search engine that determines the lineage among data items, thus avoiding errors and significantly reducing the time it takes to discover and understand metadata.
The good news is that the BI team no longer has to struggle with the unknown. Everything is within reach and can be defined easily. Octopai brings the revolution to the BI industry with its unique metadata management tool, and creates significant benefits by disrupting the way BI teams manage the complexities of metadata.
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