How to Improve Data Accessibility as a Data Analyst | 7wData

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What if you could advance your career by getting others to do your work? When you, as a data analyst, improve data accessibility for your organization, you might get exactly that. You empower others to find the answer they need, and thus do your work for you.

Data accessibility is the degree to which people in your organization can use data. That is to say that data isn’t just available, but usable — even for people with little to no experience working with data.

As a data analyst, you have an opportunity to change how your organization uses data by taking a few specific steps to improve data accessibility. In the process of changing how your organization uses data, you will not only help your coworkers use data to improve their decision making, but set yourself up for a great career.

A self-service business intelligence (BI) platform empowers your coworkers to take care of their own ad hoc data requests. When implemented well, a self-service BI platform allows anyone in your company to build dashboards and reports for themselves on-demand, no matter their level of expertise.

A self-service BI platformprioritizes ease-of-use for the end business user. There are numerous quality-of-life and automation features these platforms might have to improve data access, including low or no-code SQL query builders (like Visual SQL), automatically generated visualizations, and drag-and-drop dashboard creation.

These features combine so that anyone can query data, perform data analysis, and create their own dashboards and reports with little to no effort on your part. As an analyst, you likely receive a lot of ad hoc requests for dashboards or quick reports. All of thosead hoc requests for a dashboard or quick report will go away (or at least be drastically reduced) because your coworkers can help themselves.

Alex Knowles, Director of Strategic Initiatives at DataRobot, says that he and other leaders at DataRobot (who have gone all-in on accessible data) tell employees to “Take an afternoon and teach [the process of creating dashboards] to yourself. Don’t complain about analysts not having time to help you, just go figure it out [with Chartio].”

Music to a data analyst’s ears. But the best self-service BI platforms go even further.

A good self-service BI platform is quick to implement and provides an easy way to connect multiple data sources and datasets, from Google Sheets to Amazon Redshift. Power-user features, like a robust SQL editor and schema management, also won’t fall to the wayside with a good self-service platform.

The best of the best will have built-in (but removable) guide rails for people who don’t have extensive experience working with data. These guide rails help data newbies stay on track when creating visualizations and can even teach best practices.

When you need a standardized dashboard to serve as a source of truth, embed it into the tools your coworkers use. Embedding dashboards that answer common questions where your coworkers spend the most time will go a long way to improving data accessibility.

Some self-service BI platforms allow you to embed dashboards wherever there is an HTML iframe. There are some tools out there that focus solely on embedding analytics, but with a self-service BI tool (like Chartio ), you can embed dashboards in addition to all the other features. With a platform like Chartio, not only is the dashboard easy and quick to create, you can place it wherever it’s needed — on your website, within a tool, and even within your product.

When you embed a dashboard in a commonly used tool, for instance, your coworkers are able to find the information they need to make data-driven decisions without leaving that tool.

Say you embed an interactive dashboard directly into Salesforce to help your sales development reps.