At Slalom, we believe data is power. We believe data propels modern organizations, giving them a winning edge, again and again. But data, tools, and technology are nothing without people. Democratizing data makes information available to everyone — both technical and non-technical users — empowering them to uncover insights and make better and faster decisions.

Access and data literacy are both crucial to building a modern culture of data. It means a greater number of people with diverse perspectives can review data to develop new ideas and conclusions. It also creates a culture of experimentation and innovation that can accelerate business outcomes.

How do you enable to access and data literacy within your organization? A single, unified platform for data, easy-to-use tools, AI-driven efficiencies and insights, and a unique, people-first approach allows all levels of your organization to start learning from data.

Unify your data platform

By eliminating silos with a single platform for data, you’ll create a sound foundation from which you can scale access and analytics, and support services in multiple locations, from on-premises to public clouds to edge networks. This single-platform approach will also help you keep data secure against threats while remaining available to those who need it at all times.

The platform must also include a variety of database types to store your data. As you likely have different types of data, both structured and unstructured, your organization would benefit from access to both relational database types (such as MySQL) for structured data and non-relational databases for complex, unstructured data such as documents and key-value stores, for example. This is especially important as analyst firms such as Gartner and IDC estimate that 80–90% of organizational data is unstructured, including text, video, audio, and social media data.

Whether you choose to lift and shift, replatform, refactor, or rearchitect your data, unifying your data on a single platform is the first step toward improving access.

Provide easy-to-use tools

It’s likely that many of your people who would benefit from data analysis don’t know how to write an SQL query. Providing easy-to-use analysis tools, especially ones with pre-built queries or dashboards, is therefore vital to make data understandable. Google Cloud offers analysis tools such as BigQuery and Looker that allow users to start generating reports with just a few clicks. BigQuery provides real-time and predictive analytics based on machine learning. And while it’s easy to get started with BigQuery, it also has advanced features for data scientists working with complex datasets.

Looker is a business intelligence platform with embedded analytics designed to help your employees reduce their reliance on data teams. It provides a consistent, real-time view of data across multiple clouds along with proactive insights that can be embedded into existing applications for easier access. Interactive and dynamic dashboards let users filter and customize to ask more questions about data.

BigQuery and Looker can be used together with Slalom’s pre-built BigQuery Live Monitoring solution that bridges the gap between performance and insights. This tailored solution embeds monitoring, tracking, and operational dashboards to help optimize and empower your teams by leveraging BigQuery with Looker.

Expand with AI

Whether you’re automating repetitive tasks, amplifying efficiencies, generating rapid insights, or making sense of complex patterns, AI can improve decision-making and efficiency. With AI incorporated into your existing processes and applications, your data can evolve and scale with your business, and with new AI skill sets, your employees will be able to innovate boldly.

People-first approach

Slalom experts can deliver modern, pre-built dashboards to make access to your valuable data even easier. Our workshops can help your user’s scale analytics and get data science projects into production. Slalom will meet you wherever you are on your data journey to move your organization to a modern culture of data. By developing data literacy skills, you can empower employees to think critically, uncover insights, and communicate effectively with data.

Refrence: orignal article