October 2019 Summaries

Fivetran Inc. discusses the importance of business intelligence (BI) tools in driving data literacy across organizations and how to choose the right one. They highlight top BI tools such as Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Sisense, and others. The article provides eight key considerations when choosing a BI tool: cloud technology integration with cloud data warehouses, ease of use and interface, automated reporting and notifications, ability to import and export data, speed, performance and responsiveness, modeling layer with version control and development mode, visualization library and support for custom visualizations, and price. The article also includes real-world use cases from Fivetran customers who leverage various BI tools in their data stacks.

Finance teams can enhance efficiency through automated data pipelines, as highlighted by Jeff Tietz. By centralizing financial data using modern data stacks, which include automated connectors, cloud warehouses, and BI tools, teams can overcome the limitations of traditional in-tool reporting systems, such as those found in NetSuite, Quickbooks, and Xero. This setup allows for the integration of various data sources, providing a more comprehensive business overview while simplifying the creation of dynamic and real-time financial statements and reports. Automated pipelines reduce the need for extensive data engineering projects and facilitate data integrity checks, ensuring the accuracy and completeness of financial data. Additionally, tools like Fivetran offer prebuilt connectors that replicate raw and historical data, maintain data security through encryption and compliance with standards, and provide access to deleted data, which is crucial for understanding financial discrepancies. Such advancements enable finance teams to allocate resources to more strategic tasks, ultimately driving better analytics and decision-making outcomes.

Fivetran Transformations allows users to create ongoing snapshots of their data, enabling trend analysis over time. With the release of this feature, users can centralize data into a relational warehouse and utilize table history functionality even when their data source doesn't offer visibility into record history. The process involves creating a new transformation in Fivetran Dashboard, naming it, and pasting an SQL script that creates and updates the table history for a specified table. This feature can be used to view how data looked at a specific point in time and analyze trends while still using the base table for daily analytics.

Data governance is the process of assigning decision rights and accountability to manage and control the creation and consumption of data in an organization. It ensures data quality, compliance with regulations, and proper management of sensitive information. As companies become more data-driven, they need to move from a centralized data organization to a decentralized one, appointing a data governor who owns the data governance process. The roles of a data governor include data cleanup and maintenance, permissions and organization, integrity handling, tool selection, and education/enablement. Good data governance empowers people across an entire organization to conduct analytics, leading to improved decision-making and operational efficiency.

B2C attribution can be challenging due to complex consumer interactions across multiple devices and channels. Fivetran connectors simplify this process by combining transactional, behavioral, and campaign data. Braze is a customer engagement platform that delivers personalized messaging across various channels in real-time, offering valuable data for attribution models. By integrating Braze with Fivetran connectors for advertising services like Google Ads and payment platforms such as Square, Stripe, and Recurly, businesses can create an end-to-end view of the B2C funnel. This comprehensive data allows companies to develop accurate attribution models and optimize ad spend across channels, ultimately improving customer engagement and conversions in the rapidly growing ecommerce landscape.