Building an Analytics Stack: A guide
The Wealth of Information and the Weight of Maintenance
We live in an age of data. Across all industries and sectors, business are gaining more and more access to a wealth of information that holds the potential to spark game-changing ideas and illuminate new solutions to old problems. The opportunity is truly limitless. But with that promise comes the very real problem of needing a robust and reliable infrastructure that can make that data available quickly and easily. Think of it this way: if data is an essential resource, like water, then a data infrastructure is the series of pipes that brings it to your faucet. And just like a building needs good plumbing, every business that wants to tap into this wealth of information must grapple with the weight of maintaining the systems that make it available. That’s where an analytics stack comes in.
At its most basic level, an analytics stack is the link between raw data and business intelligence. An analytics stack is an integrated system of applications that collect, combine, analyze, and realize the value of data. This infrastructure lives within a broader business system that encompasses operations, human capital, and even organizational culture. Data-driven businesses place as much importance on having a dependable analytics infrastructure as they do on having the data itself—and they continuously refine their infrastructure to support their analytics efforts and advance their competitive edge.
Having an analytics stack has become an imperative for modern businesses. As the most successful companies continue to set new standards for efficiency and growth, their competitors, no matter their size, must embrace analytics if they want to compete. Luckily, the components of an analytics stack are becoming simpler to set up, easier to manage, and cheaper to scale.
This guide explains how the analytics stack has become the engine of a data-driven organization and how building both an analytics stack and a data-driven company culture go hand in hand.
