The role of data discovery

Most organizations have a data warehouse. It was planned to supporting daily operations and to help make business decisions. But sometimes organizations need to meet new challenges. For example, Retail Company wants to improve their customer experience and decide to work closely with the customer database. Analysts try to segment customers into cohorts and try to analyse customer's behavior. They need to handle all customer data, which is quite big. In addition, they can use external data in order to learn more about their customers. If they start to use a corporate BI tool, every interaction, such as adding new a field or filter, can take 10-30 minutes. Another issue is adding a new field to an existing report. Usually, it is impossible without the help of IT staff, due to security or the complexities of the BI Enterprise solution. This is unacceptable in a modern business. Analysts want get an answer to their business questions immediately, and they prefer to visualize data because, as you know, human perception of visualization is much higher than text. In addition, these analysts may be independent from IT. They have their data discovery tool and they can connect to any data sources in the organization and check their crazy hypotheses.

There are hundreds of examples where BI and DWH is weak, and data discovery is strong.