Forget complex dashboards and cryptic reports. Data products are putting user-friendly, real-time insights into the hands of every employee. This newfound empowerment has a ripple effect.
Data products enhance and augment business intelligence by delivering high-quality, readily accessible data for analytics and dashboards. They enable exceptional customer experiences by empowering companies with actionable insights into their customers’ needs and expectations.
Validated and reliable data also fosters operational efficiency, fuelling higher ROI and propelling overall business performance. Additionally, data products help companies unearth hidden revenue opportunities by exposing previously unseen relationships within the data. By ensuring clean and trustworthy data, they streamline productivity within the data team, allowing business users to reach answers to their questions faster and with greater confidence. Furthermore, data products serve as a unified source of truth, eliminating data discrepancies and enabling everyone to make informed, agile decisions. Data products aren’t just the latest fad. They’re the fuel that propels organisations into the future.
Defining data products
Data products are a consumption-ready set of high-quality, trustworthy, and accessible data that people across an organisation can use to solve business challenges. However, not all data products are created equal.
Key capabilities for successful data products
The best data products are organised based on business entities and governed by domain. They consist of comprehensive, clean, curated, and continuously-updated data sets that are aligned with key business entities, making them consumable by both humans and machines across the entire enterprise.
Built for consumption
Data products ensure that data is accessible and actionable for everyone, including individuals without data expertise. Through intuitive interfaces that present complex information in clear and visually impactful ways, data products empower users to effortlessly extract insights, identify patterns, and discover new opportunities for business growth.
Mastered using artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML)
Data products harness the power of AI and machine learning to continuously adapt to evolving business needs and improve data quality at scale. They employ sophisticated algorithms and ML-driven models that become smarter and more intuitive over time. This enables them to connect and transform data faster and more efficiently than traditional, rules-based approaches.
Human Intelligence
While automation and pattern recognition with AI and ML are valuable tools, data products don’t treat humans as passive consumers of insights. Instead, data products’ user-friendly interfaces equip users to be active participants in the data journey. This includes analysing data, identifying anomalies, and providing context that aligns with business objectives. The value of human expertise is in areas like domain knowledge, data governance, and critical thinking. This expertise helps interpret data, draw meaningful conclusions, and make informed decisions. Data products that facilitate collaboration between data scientists, analysts, and business users, are the most successful.
Designed to improve data quality
Effective data products provide the tools and capabilities necessary to standardise, refine, and validate data. They help organisations identify and address issues such as incompleteness, inaccuracy, duplication, and outdated information. Additionally, they leverage pre-integrated APIs and reference sources to seamlessly source and onboard trusted providers, eliminating the need to maintain custom connections.
Engineered for enrichment
Data products recognise that the most valuable insights often reside outside an organisation’s walls. They offer robust enrichment capabilities that link internal and external data using unique IDs, enabling businesses to match their data with trusted vendors that align with their specific business needs. This unlocks a wealth of relevant information and fosters innovation.
Data products propel companies forward
Data products are the linchpin that transforms raw, unstructured data into actionable insights, providing companies with a competitive edge in an increasingly data-driven business landscape. By ensuring that data is consumable, trustworthy, and comprehensive, data products improve decision-making and foster innovation. They serve as a platform for businesses to leverage their data, capitalising on its potential to drive business growth, optimise operations, and deliver superior customer experiences. The enrichment capabilities offered by data products elevate the value of company data. By embracing data products, businesses can transform their data assets into engines of growth and performance.
About the Author
Anthony Deighton is the Data Products General Manager at Tamr, bringing extensive expertise in building and scaling enterprise software companies. With a twenty-year career, Anthony joined Tamr as its Chief Product Officer and has played a pivotal role in driving the company’s success.