PyCon Nigeria Annual Conference

Data Activation - Operationalizing Analytics Data for Business End-Users.

speaker-foto

Kelvin Oyanna

I'm a Data & infrastructure Engineer with over 9 years of combined data engineering, cloud infrastructure and data analytics experience. I've spent the last few years helping businesses build optimal cloud infrastructure, performant data pipelines and analytics solutions to power their analytics & Machine learning initiatives.

Description

A lot of analytics reports/dashboards end up abandoned by business executives because they're not actionable. On the other hand, access to data for analytics has become a nightmare for most non-technical/business end-users because they don't have the required skills in SQL & data warehouse technologies to use data. In this talk, I dived deep into how Data Activation can solve the above pain points

Abstract

Introduction

While the current traditional approach (ETL/ELT) of provisioning data for analytics in organizations has served its purpose, It has however created a number of challenges. This includes:

Challenges

  1. A lot of analytics reports/dashboards end up abandoned by business executives because they're not actionable.
  2. Access to data for analytics has become a nightmare for most non-technical/business end-users because they don't have the required skills in SQL & data warehouse technologies to use data.

Food for thought:

  • How do we shift from creating dashboards that only seek to make us understand and not help us take action?
  • What if we can put back analytics data into the everyday tools (CRM, Marketing & customer support tools etc.) that end-users are familiar with so they will never need to learn SQL or data warehouse technologies before they can make use of data?

In this talk, I took a deep dive into how Data Activation can be leveraged to answer the above questions and provide solutions to the identified pain points.

What is Data Activation?

Data activation is a rapidly evolving technique based on the principle of reverse ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) which involves syncing back data into operational tools (E.g Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk etc.) from destination tools (Bigquery, Redshift, Snowflake etc.) so non-technical/business end-users can easily make use of data for analytics. It is a shift from simply understanding data to taking action on data.

Why Data Activation?

  1. Operationalize insight - Making insight a part of operational processes.
  2. Give back autonomy to business/data end-users.
  3. Reduce the time-to-value
  4. Help more teams to make data-driven decisions with less friction.

Data Activation Use-cases:

  1. Sync KPIs metrics from data warehouse to operational tools e.g. Salesforce to help teams take action directly from their tools.
  2. Integrate key performance metrics to a team's workspace so they're alerted to take prompt action when necessary.
  3. Prompting a buy/sell action at a certain market value of a stock or digital asset.

Demo:

A code demo that shows a data activation solution that sends prompts/alerts for a buy/sell action at a certain market value of a digital asset.

Audience level: Intermediate or Advanced