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Rolling Out An Analytics Project

Christina Prevalsky shares some thoughts on considerations when implementing an analytics project:

The earlier you address data quality the better; the less time your end users spend on data wrangling, and the more they can focus on high value analytics. As your organization’s data infrastructure matures, migrating from spreadsheets to databases and data warehouses, data quality checks should be formally defined, documented, and automated. Exceptions should either be handled automatically during data intake using predefined business rules logic or require immediate user intervention to correct any errors.

Providing clean, centralized, and analytics-ready data to end users should not be a one-way process. By allowing end users to focus on high-value analytics, like data mining, network graphs, clustering, etc., they can uncover certain outliers and anomalies in the data. Effective data management should include a feedback loop to communicate these findings and, if necessary, incorporate any changes in the ETL processes, making centralized data management more dynamic and flexible.

The big question to ask is, “what problem are we trying to solve?”  That will help determine the answer to many of the questions, including how you store the data, how you expose the data, and even which data you collect and keep.