Ever changing market needs, rapidly shifting business contexts and increased competition demand businesses to make important decisions quickly. To gain a competitive edge and ensure long-term success, business decision makers want to access data at all times, wherever they are. Further, organizations generate a huge volume of data at a high velocity. And hence, IT teams are under great stress as they are facing several challenges, like combining data from disparate sources, ensuring data security & governance, and providing high quality data to deliver valuable insights. At the same time, business users no more want to rely on IT for getting access to the useful information to do their jobs.
Data discovery has a central role in enabling business and IT to address these challenges and needs. While generally, more data lead to more opportunities for more relevant insights, Â the right data has to be discoverable and easy to surface. What this means is that organizations need to have tools allowing accumulation and structuring of data from multiple systems, and information sources..
Data discovery, thus, is one of the more relevant technology areas. The traditional technical means  could be very tedious, time-consuming and labor intensive. On the other side, business users are demanding greater speed, ease of use, and instant visibility. Modern data discovery technology is about gathering data from different sources, including legacy systems and processes in such a way that it allows meaningful insights to users flexibly and quickly.
Data discovery solutions also have to address challenges of consistency (as business users keep multiple copies of same data), handling multiple source systems and changes happening there, and governance (including, access controls, auditability, and version control). Since data discovery profits both IT and the business, it’s important for each group to take steps towards evaluation and adoption of a data discovery platform.
Many BI solution providers are continually building new capabilities to make the data discovery more powerful, governed and easily manageable. Today, many tools are available that support governed data discovery and each of these tools offers a unique approach to data discovery and, thus self-service Bl. According to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2016, the main focus in the coming years for BI industry would be on self-service analytics and governed data discovery.
TimeXtender is a leading solution for data discovery. Its Discovery Hub approach allows highly automated creation of modern data warehouses built on a powerful operational data exchange. This, in conjunction with data visualization and reporting tools like Qlik, Power BI, Tableau etc., allow business users to gain insights via self-service BI feeding on data discovery across all relevant information sources. As a premier TimeXtender Partner, and having Microsoft Gold competence, Advaiya’s BI and Analytics practice is focused on building and providing BI solutions with visualization and data discovery platforms.
