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How NLG is making dashboards more valuable today

By Greg Williams | August 8, 2019
2019-08-08-3Trends

Really interesting article in CIO Dive yesterday, “3 trends shaping the business intelligence market,” in which author Roberto Torres explores the rapidly evolving expectations for BI. Reading through it, we notice several scenarios where Arria NLG Studio for BI is already helping enterprises meet those expectations.

For example, Torres writes that “the future of BI will depend on vendors’ ability to present differentiated BI tools to the enterprise in a format that resonates with them, and can equip all parts of an organization with data analytics capabilities.”

It’s a pretty sure bet that no format will resonate more strongly with an enterprise’s employees, or will make BI as accessible to even the least technically oriented among them, than the natural language that they use to communicate with their fellow humans every day.

Torres also shines a light on the problem of masses of unexamined data. “Data is part of [a company’s] process, but isn’t yet helping to describe or predict their outcomes.” As the velocity of data production continues to increase, in many cases there is more data than even a company’s few specialized data scientists can analyze and explain. Here again, dynamic NLG helps uncover and distribute insights in plain words, or in narrative-augmented visuals.

The commoditization of BI has led Forrester to cover only differentiating characteristics of the competing platforms. Torres writes, “One way vendors can make their case is through the way insights are presented, not only to analysts, but to employees across an organization.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, dynamic NLG is the accessibility ticket for widespread BI literacy within an enterprise.

The article closes with another softball pitch, perfect for an NLG homer. Torres quotes Looker’s Chief Product Officer Nick Caldwell: “Instead of having a dashboard, it’s about pulling the data out of the platform and putting it into something people are more familiar with.” Nothing is more familiar than natural human language.

Nice work from Mr. Torres. We’ll keep an eye out for forthcoming articles.

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