Data is the key to business success – if organizations can efficiently and cost effectively leverage it to power their business applications

Original Article: BusinessComputing

Data: a business’s holy grail. Business and marketing leaders recognise the immense value data represents to their business and the critical role it plays in their future and growth potential – if they can effectively deploy that data. In a recent survey conducted by Deloitte, 49 per cent of respondents said that data analytics help them make better decisions. The critical question is: are businesses able to effectively extract and evaluate their data, connect it to the right business applications, and use it to their full advantage?

For many businesses, the answer is unfortunately no. Coding resources can be expensive, and without them companies often struggle to access, analyse, understand and effectively use their data. Most companies don’t have the existing architecture, algorithms or machine learning (ML) expertise they need to intelligently and correctly route the right data to the right business application. The result? Many businesses today find themselves unable to unlock the value of their data or use it to power their business applications.

Some organisations have already solved the problem around data centralisation and aggregation. The greatest challenge lies in their ability to run machine learning models against this data and identify a way to connect that data output to their core business applications. This can involve much more than simply moving and uploading/downloading data. For some it may require extensive DevOps work, which is expensive, intricate and may require specific data architecture to route the applicable data intelligently and correctly to the right business application.

One large obstacle here is that machine learning is often seen as a technical issue that is the responsibility of the IT or development department. This can lead to data analysis that becomes siloed and separated from the sales, operations and business side of an organisation. I’m constantly surprised when I speak to Fortune 500 leaders and hear them tell me that their sales and marketing teams can’t leverage their critical data to feed their business applications because they don’t have the requisite skills to access, analyse and route it. It’s no surprise then that the true value of data is lying untapped in so many organisations worldwide.

What then is the missing link for businesses? How can leaders ensure value is continuously extracted from their data and used to help the business accelerate time to market for new products, reduce technical complexity and enhance team collaboration? Businesses need a simplified process to achieve this, one that doesn’t require a massive surge in resources, budget or coding. They need the right tools to easily share data outputs directly to the appropriate business applications to help their internal teams – from sales and marketing to HR – perform their job more effectively and drive better business results.

The answer? Businesses need the right platform that will empower their developers and growth hackers who may not be machine learning experts to easily connect their business applications, run their own machine learning models and automate workflows – with no coding required. Leveraging this type of full technology can help businesses organise, analyse and share data to create real business benefits without the additional expense and resource.

Businesses now have a great opportunity to focus on giving data savvy developers advanced tools that help them do the heavy lifting to achieve their goals without requiring significant infrastructure or resource investment. For example, our Datagran no code platform is easy for developers and growth hackers to access and deploy to share, organise and analyse data and seamlessly route this data to the right business applications. Our drag and drop features require no machine learning experience to operate, which means you can complete your projects and meet your business goals with fewer resources, cost and tools. Businesses can manage and deploy data faster to reduce execution time and eliminate the manual processes and need for developers to write their own algos, code or APIs to connect to a business application.

Through no code platforms like ours, businesses of all sizes across all industries can:

• Reap the benefits of data science while strengthening their existing development teams
• Enhance collaboration between teams and technologies to ensure they work better together
• Reduce the total number of tools needed to meet business goals and instead use the ideal tools for their business requirements – without the need to develop new code or APIs to integrate them.

It’s also vital that businesses focus on empowering their existing teams and developing home grown talent. This is why we’ve created Datagran Academy, an online education and training hub to help clients who are not machine learning experts or data scientists understand how to use the Datagran platform to easily deploy algorithms. Businesses need to realise there are no code alternatives available to them that will empower them to perform what they previously considered heavy tech work themselves. If they can embrace this type of offering, they can save themselves significant time, budget and resources while improving the development and skills of their people – the other vital asset of any business.

By Carlos Mendez, CEO, Datagran.

Read the original article here.