Alteryx Tries Cracking the Data Democratization Puzzle
- By Winston Thomas
- February 27, 2023
We’ve been here before: A new platform, a splashy announcement, and a claim that everyone can access data to make data-driven decisions.
It has not panned out that way in reality. The are several reasons. Many companies have gone down this path and have faced dead ends as a result. Yet, while people are becoming more data-driven by the minute, they are not finding the tools usable as advertised.
What’s stopping data democratization
To find out why we are in this situation, we need to define what democratized data really is. The general idea is to have data that is available when and where a user needs it so that it becomes part of everyday work life. Data science teams and data engineers know it is not as simple as it sounds.
It is why we face three significant challenges regarding data democratization.
First is data governance. Without a proper framework, it can impact data quality downstream and make users doubt their data. The second related challenge is making data cleaning, wrangling and transforming easy.
Lastly, companies find it challenging to drive adoption, which is perhaps the biggest hurdle and can be a generational gap. Besides, if the leadership is not using the platform in their daily decision-making, there is no reason why other employees should.
Yet, many are optimistic. A McKinsey study said that by 2025 employees will see data usage as natural, do it in real-time, have flexible means of data organization, see data assets supported as data products, join new data ecosystem memberships, and prioritize and automate data management.
The new Alteryx announcement goes a long way in aligning with these forecasts. The new platform focuses on quickly shifting the needle from those starting on data analytics to those reaching maturity.
The 2023 State of the Cloud report by Alteryx highlighted this in numbers.
“It showed that 25% are just getting started with cloud analytics, and only 27% consider themselves mature,” says Adam Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of Alteryx Analytics Cloud.
Wilson points out that around half of those surveyed were in the middle. And he believes that the new product can help many of them to become data-driven quickly by addressing the three major challenges cited above.
Decoding the Alteryx promise
Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform assumes that companies are moving to cloud-based analytics, where “87% of organizations are already using cloud analytics in some capacity,” says Wilson citing the Alteryx report.
A major feature of the platform is the addition of a revamped Designer Cloud. The new interface allows users to access “more than 30 extended prep, blend, analysis, and automation tools for intelligent decision making.” Users can use no-code, and low-code means to use these features.
The new platform is not just for data users with little or no data science knowledge. Data engineers will also appreciate the tighter integration of Trifacta Data Engineering Cloud. This allows them to scale their pipelines and ensure users get timely insights.
In addition, Alteryx is adding AutoML capabilities that cater to machine learning and time series needs. “Some of the new enhancements that we've created will automatically detect that a data set is a time series data set, and we'll apply and suggest a time series model that will display a decomposition of the data set, which includes charts and trends and seasonality, giving you a real sense for overall trends,” says Wilson.
The addition takes a step further into a major issue with current data democratization tools — that they do not go deep enough for more advanced analyses.
Alteryx is also going further. “We realized that we can only build apps so fast, even though we're building many of them in a hurry. We also realize that we need to provide APIs and interfaces that allow customers to build their own. We think that providing that kind of extensibility inside the framework is what's going to give a lot of flexibility and handle a lot of the long tail use cases,” said Wilson.
Another significant new feature is what it calls the Common Causes. This is where its 2021 acquisition of Hyper Anna comes in.
“This allows the business user to analyze the root cause of complex issues and understand intricate relationships between two metrics over time. So this gives them a much deeper understanding of their most important KPIs, really providing them with an explanation of how performance across 2 metrics changes over time,” says Wilson. He points to price elasticity as an example that economists like to explore.
The platform also has a Metrics Store that helps decision-makers with a “trusted view of enterprise KPIs,” said Wilson.
Doing away with self-service trade-offs
One major misconception is that self-service analytics, like what the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform supports, has a data governance trade-off.
“We want to blow up the false trade-off that exists between self-service and governance,” adds Wilson.
Besides being ISO 27001, with its Designer Cloud and Alteryx Machine Learning achieving SOC2 Type II certification, the platform aims to drive data trust. It is supposed to adhere closely to governance frameworks and policies and eliminate “workarounds,” explained Wilson.
The Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform is expected to complete this audit in the second half of 2023. But today, it can handle private data and gives customers control over where to store and process their data.
“I mean, the genie is out of the bottle on self-service [and there is increasing] business demands [for analytics] at the same time through the cloud. There's an opportunity to provide more oversight and more monitoring to do a better job of facilitating crowd-sourcing the best stuff and bringing it in,” says Wilson,
And then making sure that [data products] are exposed to the entire organization,” he adds.
Of course, whether you have the right organizational structure to support a data-driven organization that is moving at the speed of thought is another matter.
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends and DigitalWorkforceTrends. He’s a singularity believer, a blockchain enthusiast, and believes we already live in a metaverse. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/rudall30
Winston Thomas
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends. He likes to piece together the weird and wondering tech puzzle for readers and identify groundbreaking business models led by tech while waiting for the singularity.