Modern Analytics Platforms

Chapter 3. The Future of Analytics Is Converged

Converged analytics unifies advances in AI, streaming data, and related technologies into a seamless analytics experience for all users. This arrangement unlocks prescriptive analytics across an organization, allowing anyone to make data-driven decisions that answer important questions. Chapter 1 provided real-life examples of converged analytics in action; here, we’ll examine the alignment of people, processes, tools, and data to get there.

People

As we saw in Chapter 2, statisticians and IT served information to business users at the inception of a wider analytics adoption; further into maturity, data analysts and scientists built systems where business users could self-serve insights. In a converged architecture, not only is the business user at the center, but their decision making is augmented by automation.

Given this arrangement, there is more collaboration, more automation, and greater scale for data-driven insights as a result of the convergence of teams and workstreams. Teams can work cross-functionally and in parallel across different domains iterating the system to their needs with the raw time and human resources needed to create and maintain analytics products such as dashboards and models.

Processes

While perhaps using different means, the ends of older analytics approaches were the same: insights, whether historic or in support of future decisions, using governed data and processes. In the methods for doing so, ...