Introduction

Data the new oil, as the adage goes, is becoming central to every organization’s growth plan and an enabler for carving out optimized profitability stories. While business focus should be on developing strategies for expansion and business growth, teams in operations, marketing, finance, et al. are often seen spending long waiting hours (with a goal towards decision intelligence), but ultimately getting fragmented data available at their fingertips. Data for them is the ultimate maze and gold mine of sorts to give them cognizance of the current state of business affairs and help them plan or lead to better futuristic goals too. Without data it’s a kin to trying to balance your stride while walking in the dark, maybe in an unknown land!

Data, its importance and its challenges

Do you know your data well? The answer to this question may not just test your business acumen but also the technical know-how in today’s world of decision intelligence. Rewind a few decades back, where business processes were simple, applications that managed these processes could generate data that could just fit into a few spreadsheets and be available to businesses at the click of a document. Data complexities were minimal in terms of quality, quantity, and more importantly accessibility. Fast forward to today the data now has a new name – big data, that is not only big in attributing to its size but also the challenges that it brings with it on the table, lets attempt listing a few,

• Complexity – Multiple applications managing different aspects of business operations eventually generate complex data that need the data literacy and adept skill set to understand how data relations can be established.
• Scale – The speed at which data is generated and hence the associated volume cannot fit into even a library of spreadsheets.
• Variety – Data is not just about text or numbers in rows & columns, it can metamorphosize into any form. This variety is too hard to handle.
• Governance – Who is viewing what? Who is sharing what? With whom? These questions cannot be taken lightly and need data governance to be answered

And because of all the above, we have the mammoth issue of information silos; it curbs data from getting to the right people at the right time.

These challenges are not what business teams understand or can even handle. This lack of data literacy, and the complexity of traditional data analytics tools hinders the widespread adoption of data-driven decision-making across the organization.

Need of the hour – Data democratization

Data democratization aims to break down these barriers and empower employees at all levels with access to data and the ability to leverage it for decision-making. It helps with user friendly tools and interfaces to allow business decision makers to explore, analyze, and visualize data with governance in place, and with the utmost flexibility and limited external dependencies. This briefly gives a definitive sense of what data democratization would imply for an organization. There are various AI-powered data analytics products in the market that can enable organizations to easily adopt data democratization strategies without disturbing the existing data architectures and framework.

Through data democratization, organizations can foster a culture of data-driven decision-making where employees are encouraged to ask questions, test hypotheses, and derive insights that drive innovation and business growth. By putting data into the hands of those who need it most, organizations can unlock the collective intelligence of their workforce and make more informed decisions, thus setting the trajectory right from data democratization to decision intelligence.

Introducing the Fosfor Decision Cloud – An enabler for data democratization and decision intelligence

The Fosfor Decision Cloud (FDC), as seen in figure 1 below, is a cutting-edge AI powered data analytics platform or a decision cloud on Snowflake designed to enable data democratization and decision intelligence within organizations.

It eases data operability challenges by providing:

• A unified product to complete the data-to-decisions journey, eliminating fragmentation and multiplicity of tools.
• A simple user experience to focus on business outcomes and not on integrating multiple technologies.
• AI & Automation to boost productivity across the data-to-decisions journey.

1. Do you want to orchestrate data and ensure what you have is a trusted data layer?
2. Do you foresee deriving insights from your trusted data layer through AI/ML interventions?
3. Do you want to experience business outcomes come to life through natural language interactions and diagnose the why, how, when of business outcomes through AI?

All this (and more)is possible with the Fosfor Decision Cloud. These different capabilities of the FDC work together for different data personas that either focus on data engineering, ML engineering, or data modelling. Once these personas leverage the full potential of what FDC has to offer, the business users are seamlessly enabled with the power to take decisions that can fuel innovations and thereby business growth.

Key takeaways on how the FDC assures data democratization

• No more data silos
• Data resides always within Snowflake for the entire data-to-decision journey
• Semantic modeling capabilities within the FDC ensure data relations are handled and not fragmented.
• Manage scale and complexities of data within the predefined framework and ensure a trusted data layer.
• Data accessible to all
• For a specific industry/business problem that is being analyzed, the data orchestrated is accessible to all designer personas to work end to end. Eventually and almost seamlessly the decision makers can infer the same to make business decisions faster.
• Assured data governance &security
• It is central and effectively governed by data governance rules. Access honored without compromising data.
• Reduced latency for data access to data insight
• No longer prolonged wait times and dependencies on other teams to extract data and share in fragments, which significantly delays the data-to-decision journey. The teams can build and spin up working business solutions with user-friendly, no code/low code interfaces.

Conclusion

The following visual representation(Fig. 2) just summarizes how well the Fosfor Decision Cloud can simplify and accelerate decision intelligence(by enabling data democratization)for data engineers and decision makers, and empowering them to get to the objectives faster & easier all within one product ecosystem.