Achieving actionable data through reverse ETL, or operational analytics
“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” So said former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina. And we couldn’t agree more. A business without access to rich data does not have the information needed to base its decisions about the future. And without that information, it’s hard to arrive at insights about just what are the best business strategies to ensure success. Let’s be honest: when it comes to the data produced in the world of business, a lot of it is less than useful. And then there’s actionable data. This is a form of data that couldn’t be any clearer about what action steps need to be taken. But it is notoriously difficult to generate. This is where reverse ETL, or operational analytics comes in. Reverse ETL is one way of giving your business access to richer and more insightful data.
With this in mind, let’s explore how reverse ETL works and why it’s important. But first, we should probably define plain old ETL first.
Table of content:
What is ETL?
ETL is the acronym for extract, transform, load. Essentially, this is the process whereby data is taken from a source and loaded into a data warehouse.
What is reverse ETL?
As the name suggests, it is the opposite process to the one we’ve just outlined. Rather than loading data into a data warehouse, this time we’re unloading it. We are copying it from a central data warehouse and inputting it into operational systems, hence why it is also sometimes referred to as operational analytics. To make this work, we need to plug back into those data sources where we retrieved the data in the first place. We basically need to create a big loop. We can take the data that has been enriched in the data warehouse and salvage it for different purposes. Then we can feed it back to different teams of people, say for instance our buddies in marketing, sales, or support, to make their jobs easier.
Why is reverse ETL important?
Despite swimming in a vast sea of data, many modern businesses are starving for actionable data. To make better business decisions, it’s vital that companies unlock the important data they have siloed in data warehouses. The beauty about this data is that it has already been enriched using models and business logic, so it’s ripe for the picking! The only problem is that legacy ETL tools are not designed to facilitate reverse ETL processes. This is a real bummer because you have all this great data sitting in your warehouse, but you cannot unload it to your critical applications to maximize its value.
Reverse ETL uses and benefits
The goal of reverse ETL is to furnish the different teams in your business teams with rich data insights so that their work can be more data-driven. It’s true that most companies want to focus more on what their data is telling them. It’s also true that in a modern, busy company there is so much data floating around that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
Let’s use an example to illustrate one of the best uses for reverse ETL, or operational analytics. Within a typical B2B company, the sales team wants to know which leads hold the most promise. Now the data team have some work to do. They need to make their data analysis actionable. They can do this by using reverse ETL to push the desired data back out of the warehouse and into the hands of sales (via Salesforce, for instance). Now the sales team has rich data insights in the form of customer lead scores they can use to fine-tune their sales approach. Voila! We have just used reverse ETL to produce operational analytics, in the form of actionable data for our sales team! Imagine this process repeated right across all the different teams in an organization and you can begin to understand the potential of reverse ETL to create data-driven organizations.
It’s only the beginning
Reverse ETL and operational analytics is only a recent game-changer in the world of data stacks. In fact, it makes sense to think of it as the latest layer in the data stack. If you would like to gain access to this untapped stratum of rich, actionable data why not get in touch with us at deepskydata? Our passion is unlocking the power of data to help your business grow. We’d love to hear about your data journey and show you how our data expertise can help you to take a quicker path towards becoming a truly data-driven business.