
Ask HN: How to go about the goal of democratising data at our organisation - tarungarg546
 Hi Everyone! Hope you all are doing great.<p>We(@ squadvoice.co) wanted to take your help&#x2F;suggestion in something we&#x27;re trying and figuring out if to build or not.
Below is the problem statement that we&#x27;re focusing on majorly.
Become a data-driven organization where anyone can make decisions &amp; leverage data in a self-service model without spending too much time on data retrieval or data query formation. 
Why we&#x27;re thinking we should build a solution for the same?<p>1) Ad-hoc analysis requires engineering bandwidth at a lot of time. And due to that product features get delayed.<p>2) New queries require engineering support at a lot of times.<p>3) Operational queries become stale (inconsistent) with changing business logic.<p>4) Queries timeout, run slow, etc.<p>5) We take lots of decision basis the data, and if data fetching and gathering is slow and time taking it is gonna slow whole org down.<p>We do have SQL dashboarding and things in place, but new requirements keep coming up(I guess we&#x27;re trying to find new data points every day to see what we can improve which is great honestly) and application+business logic change so often that it is hard to keep it updated.<p>Now, we wanted to understand:-<p>1) How people in other organizations like yours are solving the same?<p>2) What are the things you tried what works and what does not?<p>3) How do you validate whether it is something that you should solve for or not?<p>4) What&#x27;re technologies and gotchas that you think should we be aware of and consider for this kind of things?<p>5) How do you make sure, whatever you build is scalable and alterable such that if you change your application logic in future things still remains sane.<p>6) How do you make sure, people are able to get data they need as fast as they can.<p>I am already sorry if this post looks long and some redundant elements, but I wanted to communicate problem and what we&#x27;re looking for help in as clear as possible.
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seektable
First step is providing simple self-service access to data with minimal
time/money efforts. Typical approach is:

* data sources (database tables & columns) are isolated from end users with some kind of 'model'; end-users operate in terms of this model. This model is created & maintained by 'publishers' \- this is user(s) with some technical background that know database structure & SQL good enough. In large organizations this is IT specialists, in small businesses this role is covered by founders/managers with tech skills. If organization database(s) cannot handle OLAP queries directly some kind of data lake is organized to deal with slow queries.

* end users use BI tool to perform ad-hoc analysis, save & share their reports.

Also it is good idea to start from something very simple that can be
configured very fast; in this way you can collect feedback from end-users (BI
consumers) as early as possible, and then decide if you need to invest more in
more complex / enterprise oriented BI solutions. In this context, I may
recommend to check our BI tool:
[https://www.seektable.com](https://www.seektable.com) (both cloud service and
on-premise installations are possible).

