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Self-Service Data Prep: a Gartner Guide

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Self-Service Data Prep: a Gartner Guide

Self-service data preparation offers agility and competitive advantage to a business. But a lot can go wrong.

Jan 18, 2016

A variety of new tools exist to capture and prepare data from emerging sources such as the IoT, social media, and smart meters. The growing sophistication of such data preparation tools allows the average business user to analyze and visualize the data, often with no coding chops required.

There’s a dilemma, however, in embracing self-service data preparation. Businesses that don’t use such tools, or govern their use with a strict IT hand, lose agility and could be at a competitive disadvantage. Opening the floodgates on self-service data prep, meanwhile, could lead to chaos and business mistakes from faulty analysis — the kind of spreadsheet errors that caused a major bank to purchase toxic mortgages or helped cause an economic collapse.

In this special report you will learn:

  • Four use cases in which self-service data preparation is preferable to centralized data warehousing
  • Four classes of data preparation products and industry-leading vendors in each class
  • How to get the right tool to the right user, including recommendations for data governance and business roles.

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