~4 minute read

When we say data accessibility, we mean removing the barriers that keep you from leveraging the data in your databases to its fullest. Great software solutions or enterprises that support enhanced data access can empower anyone — in any role or industry — to rely on their data as a single source of truth. This enables them to derive critical insights and make informed decisions in their daily tasks.

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In today’s digital world, the abundance of valuable data presents both an opportunity to get ahead, and a hurdle to overcome.

Companies using a data-driven approach must first actively collect good data. But they also need to organize it, manage it, and ensure that the data is discoverable, explorable, and useful. Once you solve these challenges, you can make data-driven decisions and take strategic action based on informative insights stemming from an accurate and holistic view of business performance.

So, why is the topic of data accessibility so important? Simply put: data doesn’t mean anything to businesses or team members if they can’t access it.

Read more: Why SaaS Leaders are Reimagining Data Access for Data-Powered Customers

There are hundreds of tools on the market seeking to make data more accessible. You can see this goal driving significant expansion in the realm of business intelligence and reporting software in recent years. These offerings vary significantly in the amount of data “accessibility” they offer.

More often than not, the level of data accessibility leaves something to be desired. The depth of analysis you can gain with these tools tends to make using it more and more complicated the more insights you seek. For example, let’s say you want to build a custom report that pulls in data from several tables in a database. Only a team member who knows how to query a database using SQL or another specialized query language can complete this kind of task. Once they’ve found the requested data, that person might format the report into something more digestible for the intended audience or hand that duty to another team member.

Often, the data isn’t organized into meaningful visualizations or accompanied by any helpful context.

Even with the great BI tools of today, only power users get the most potential out of data solutions. Only they have the expertise to build impactful visualizations and dashboards, the ability to write SQL and query data on an ad hoc basis, and the working knowledge about creating relevant conditions and navigating menus to analyze the data effectively.

Read more: 4 Key Elements of an Exceptional Embedded Data Access Tool

But it’s not only power users who need data day-to-day. Front-line staff, brand new interns, mid-level managers, and busy C-suite executives all need data to achieve success. It’s imperative that data access solutions break the barriers to critical insights and information, making it accessible to everyone.

Providing excellent data accessibility means giving every user the right tools for the job. Ideally, these already-powerful solutions would provide more intuitive and zero learning-curve data access features that support a broader range of user types.

SaaS providers and enterprises that can achieve the the level of intuitive, self-serve data accessibility that today’s users demand will separate themselves from the pack and come out ahead in today’s increasingly data-powered economic landscape.

Delivering Next-Gen Data Access with AI

With a chat-style AI-backed solution for data accessibility, users can type or ask questions in their own words to search for the data they need. They can access answers to their questions from anywhere within their existing — and therefore familiar — interface or workspace.

Users can easily build out dashboards without learning how to set up parameters, combine dimensions, or navigate a series of complex dropdown menus and filters. Instead, non-power users can build and edit dashboards in seconds, simply by typing questions in their own words.

With a data accessibility tool that uses natural language to make databases accessible to any user, SaaS providers, enterprises, and other businesses can introduce new self-serve reporting functionality to their systems. With these new functions, companies can augment existing reporting and analytics capabilities to solve new use cases and provide better user experiences.

Through Chata’s robust API, any organization can access the power of AutoQL: a powerful AI-driven system that enables the dynamic translation of text to SQL. AutoQL makes it possible for anyone to query a relational database and receive immediate answers, simply by asking questions in natural language.

For both customers and end users, this kind of solution blends the zero learning-curve of pre-built reporting and analytics tools with the slice-and-dice and data exploration capabilities of a powerful BI tool. Now, you can reduce cognitive load and promote efficiency in data-driven workflows, with the power of Chata.