As a business in this age, it should be considered a norm that your decisions are made with the consideration of data and analytics. Many reports have been done on companies using data to drive their decision making and the result is always the same – data-driven companies outperform traditional companies in almost every metric used to measure the success of a business.

Why?

Imagine you and your friend decide to get scooters and sell ice cream products for a week. These ice creams expire in a week and you guys divide the ice cream products equally. So, both of you have 200 ice cream products and you agree to start on Monday. You set out Monday, the 13th to go sell ice cream. Your friend stays indoors the whole day, watching cartoons. You come back having sold 3 products and used over half your fuel.

Tuesday hits, and you guys both go out to sell products and by the end of the day, you guys both have 100 products. Your friend has used half the fuel, you on the other hand are running on E. Wednesday hits, and you guys both set out to sell. You start by refuelling your scooter (using the money you made) and you set out. You guys sell 100 products again – but guess what? The decision you made on Monday, has left you in a position where you reap fewer benefits even though you worked harder.

What happened? Well, your good ol’ buddy checked the weather on Monday and you didn’t. Turns out, it was raining and no one was looking for ice cream in such conditions. Go figure

As much as the above scenario seems really simple but you’d be surprised at the number of companies that just set out to work as if it’s 1925. Smart business decisions actually lead to better performance as conveyed in a recent study by McKinsey. The study found that companies that are data-driven outperform their competitors by up to 20%. Why would you, as a business owner, operate your business knowing you could perform by 20% more if you just made use of analytics?

Enter – Amazon QuickSight.

Among the vast majority of products offered by AWS, one of their rapidly growing products is Amazon QuickSight.

What is it?

Amazon QuickSight is a BI (Business Intelligence) tool that is used to visualise and interact with data. It’s a cloud-native product so, unlike most BI tools available it allows you to scale up and down with the freedom of not having to worry about the hardware needed or capital expenses.

Amazon QuickSight was initially produced by Amazon for internal use within the company, but as time progressed the AWS team saw the need to make this product available for public use and since then – the product has made strides within the BI field. Being one of the latest BI tools to arrive in the market, the growth of Amazon QuickSight is a testament to its functionality and innovative methods of interacting with data.

https://www.peerspot.com/categories/bi-business-intelligence-tools

To be honest, making decisions using data is not something we can fault businesses for not doing because it can be extremely difficult and complicated. Although still a BI tool, I can assure you that Amazon QuickSight comes with one of the most straightforward and intuitive UX (User Experience) designs in the market – making it easy for you to navigate, interpret and interact with your data.

Amazon QuickSight Q.

QuickSight Q is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) based ability in QuickSight built using innovative Machine Learning (ML) methods with natural language processing (NLP) ability at the forefront. 

QuickSight Q is a feature within QuickSight built using advanced tech to help us ask questions and query data in natural or conversational language, and receive immediate answers.
For example, if I had a graph on QuickSight showing 20 000 players who scored goals across Europe – all I would do to find out who scored more between Messi and Ronaldo is type in:

“Who has more goals between Messi and Ronaldo?”

And the answer would just pop up.

So, instead of spending time sending messages to your tech team to request data insights that they have to get through something like a SQL query. Rather, ask QuickSight Q yourself, and retrieve those insights quickly and easily, with any prior coding and database administration knowledge. 

Taking out the middleman between you and your data to ensure productivity and accessibility. Understanding how to interact with your data and how to make out of your data will prove to be one of your greatest strengths as an organisation. Additionally, QuickSight offers support for many different data types from a multitude of 3rd party applications and data sources. 

Legacy Business Intelligence solutions have stood the test of time and served their function well. However, data is becoming more powerful, more sensitive and more complex. Utilising QuickSight dashboards will truly enable your organisation to interact and engage with your data in a more efficient, accessible and intuitive way.

Contact CloudZA to discuss our QuickSight solutions and data analytics architectures. Let us take the leap into the future and start working smarter instead of harder.