Published on the 26/07/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

ETL is a traditional bugbear for business intelligence because the act of extracting, transforming and loading is neither fun nor intrinsically valuable. It is only once the data is suitably prepped that anything meaningful can be done with it. That’s why self-service data preparation is enticing: it offers to empower business analysts and data scientists with the ability to ready the raw material from which insights are drawn without the intervention of the IT department.

Greg Cullen ANZ MD of self-service data management vendor Talend noted that if done well, self-service data preparation (SSDP) can allow anyone to put data to work in their operational context, whether they are in finance, sales, marketing or human resources. “Until now, obtaining accurate data has typically been difficult and time-consuming. In fact, business analysts spend roughly 80 percent of their time preparing data, leaving just 20 per cent for extracting and sharing insights.”

SSDP is a nascent market which Gartner expects to tip the billion-dollar mark by 2019, with the researcher anticipating a 16.6 percent compound annual growth rate. It said adoption is low right now, at just 5 percent of potential target users.

Lesser-known than Gartner, Bloor Research nevertheless provides a handy and insightful overview of just what SSDP is, what it does and to whom it is relevant. “This whole market is emerging. At present different vendors are targeting different sectors of the market: in particular business analysts versus data scientists, and data preparation versus data unification,” wrote analyst Philip Howard.

Continuing, Cullen said SSDP provides the ability to explore, cleanse, enrich and combine data in minutes instead of hours. It also allows line-of-business users to apply their own unique domain expertise and work directly with data relevant to their business objectives. “By simplifying the whole process, this kind of capability represents another step towards the democratisation of data analysis and a further step away from using traditional spreadsheets,” he noted.

Cullen said SSDP tools enable even those with no IT background to get data into the format they need. “Users can start working on their data while avoiding having to create complicated formulas, write code or complete the same tasks over and over again.”

However, he also pointed out that self-service tools don’t rule out the IT department altogether, and should instead foster closer collaboration between it and business users. “Data democratisation is not anarchy. Rather, it needs control, rules and governance, or otherwise it will fail.”