To build a data fabric that covers all your business’ data needs, you need to think beyond today and look toward the future. That means once your data is prepped and ready, it’s time to put it to work, not just for today, but for the days, weeks, months and years ahead with predictive capabilities.

You don’t need a crystal ball to know data is the competitive differentiator that drives innovation across all business verticals. Forrester even goes so far as to say that insight-driven businesses will take $1.8 trillion from competitors that are not effectively using data to make insightful decisions. With the help of AI and machine learning, forecasting the future is most certainly the core of data-driven businesses today, making predictive capabilities a necessary piece of any data fabric.

To make certain your data strategy holds together, be sure your predictive tools:

Don’t Overcomplicate

Predictive analytics may have a reputation for being complicated, but building predictive models does not have to be hard work. To increase data collaboration, it’s critical that the process in which insight is eventually generated be user-friendly, even for those without a degree in data science. With a solution that removes the complexity from building, managing and deploying models, even less data-experienced users can collaborate on the data driving your organization forward.

Focus on the Future

With the deluge of data being created each and every day, 175 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025 according to IDC, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Add a predictive analytics solution for every day of the week and the process can get complicated quickly.  Cut through the noise to the features you absolutely need for predictive analysis:

• Interactive workflows that allow you to easily build, display, refresh and reuse analytic models, all within a single environment
• Data preparation and data profiling features for easy extraction, manipulation, and transformation of data for modeling
• User-friendly visual outputs such as decision trees that visually display easy to interpret results that allow you to deploy prescriptive strategies faster than ever before
• Model building features that eliminate the need to code, but allow you to easily generate code to deploy models in other analytical environments

Leave No Data Behind

When you’re using data and machine learning to predict future actions and trends, you need all the data you can get. Unfortunately, one of the top data challenges for many businesses is the number of disparate data sources that must be accounted for — structured, unstructured, cloud, and open-source languages. Often this means some data can’t be formatted correctly and either is excluded or misinterpreted. It goes without saying, both can have a serious impact on the results and the trust your organization has in its data. Make certain your predictive solution can work with all of the sources you need to and can adapt to those yet to come.

An insights-driven  business is one that is reliant on data, including data that can help predict what likely will happen as you look into the future. Your data management strategy needs to be built on easily discovering insight.  If not, you could quickly fall behind your competitors. Building the right data fabric for your business needs means developing a data management platform that ensures data integrity, lineage, and control to empower the business to make decisions from trusted, predictive models.

Whether you’re reweaving your data fabric or starting from scratch, Altair Knowledge Works can help you structure and strengthen your data fabric from start to finish in a way that works for your business. Contact us here to get started.