Elevate Your Career by Empowering Others
Imagine advancing your career by delegating tasks to others. As a data analyst, enhancing data accessibility within your organization can lead to just that. By empowering your colleagues to independently find the answers they need, you're effectively getting them to handle part of your workload.
Understanding Data Accessibility
Data accessibility refers to how easily people within your organization can use available data. It’s about making data not just available, but also user-friendly for those with minimal data expertise.
As a data analyst, you can transform how your organization utilizes data by taking concrete steps to improve accessibility. This not only assists your coworkers in making informed decisions but also positions you for career advancement.
Utilize Self-Service Business Intelligence
A self-service business intelligence (BI) platform enables your colleagues to handle their own data inquiries. When properly implemented, it allows anyone in your company to create dashboards and reports on-demand, regardless of their data proficiency.
Self-service BI platforms are designed for ease of use, featuring tools like low or no-code SQL query builders, automatically generated visualizations, and drag-and-drop dashboard creation. These features ensure that anyone can query data, analyze it, and generate their own reports with minimal effort on your part.
This significantly reduces the number of ad hoc requests you receive, as coworkers can now generate the data insights they need independently. However, the best self-service BI platforms offer even more.
A high-quality self-service BI platform is quick to deploy and seamlessly connects multiple data sources, from Google Sheets to Amazon Redshift. It also includes advanced features like robust SQL editors and schema management.
The top-tier platforms provide built-in, yet removable, guide rails for users who are new to data work. These guide rails help beginners create accurate visualizations and learn best practices.
Embed Dashboards in Everyday Tools
To enhance data accessibility, embed standardized dashboards into the tools your coworkers use daily. Placing dashboards where your team spends the most time can significantly improve data accessibility.
Some self-service BI platforms allow you to embed dashboards anywhere HTML iframes are supported. While some tools specialize in embedding analytics, a comprehensive self-service BI tool (like Kowsika 😊) offers embedding alongside other features. With Kowsika, you can quickly create and place dashboards wherever needed—be it on your website, within a tool, or even inside your product.
Embedding dashboards in frequently used tools means your colleagues can access crucial data without leaving their work environment. For example, embedding an interactive dashboard in Salesforce can provide sales reps with real-time data to warm up leads during calls.
Promote Data Literacy Across the Organization
Improving data access is only part of the equation; you also need to ensure that data is used effectively. Develop a strategy to boost data literacy among your coworkers, enabling them to accurately interpret and utilize the data at their disposal.
Even the most intuitive self-service BI tools and embedded analytics can't prevent potential data misinterpretation. Concepts like selection bias or the difference between relative and absolute change might be clear to data professionals but confusing to others.
To foster data literacy, consider conducting monthly workshops, creating a collaborative Slack channel, or building an internal knowledge base.
For instance, Clever, a client of ours, maintains a Slack channel called "Number Munchers" where data novices share tips on using Kowsika and optimizing their data usage. Starting a similar channel could be an easy first step for you.
Promoting data literacy fosters a culture of data collaboration. Over time, this culture becomes self-sustaining, enhancing the overall quality and use of data within the organization.
Embrace Your Evolving Role
As you enhance data accessibility, your role will evolve from being the primary source of insights to a facilitator who helps others discover and utilize their own insights. This shift is part of a broader transformation in the field of data analytics, one that you can lead within your organization.
Improving data accessibility has become crucial for businesses of all sizes. The objective is to provide the right data at the right time to enable informed decision-making.
A new role, known as the analytics engineer, is emerging in response to this shift. Analytics engineers focus on the technical aspects of data accessibility, including data modeling, data management, metadata standardization, data quality assurance, and establishing data-driven workflows.
This role complements the broader trend of making data more accessible and user-friendly. As data quality improves, so does the effectiveness of self-service BI platforms, creating a virtuous cycle of increasing data accessibility and utility.
Start Enhancing Data Accessibility Today
To begin improving data accessibility, you need a self-service BI tool. This will enable everyone to become their own data analyst and allow you to embed dashboards as needed.
We recommend Kowsika, a self-service BI platform dedicated to breaking down barriers to becoming data-driven. Get your free copy of Kowsika today and start making data more accessible in your organization.
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