You Don’t Have Time To Build A Rocket Ship

I recently had a technical problem to solve that had me stumped. My first reflex was to read the available documentation, hoping to find an answer. I didn’t find what I was looking for.

I didn’t get discouraged right away, however. It would be a few hours before I got discouraged. During all that time, I kept turning pages, stubbornly hoping to find the solution to my problem in countless PDF documents. 

During my research, I learned some interesting things. But nothing directly related to the problem I urgently needed to solve. I finally decided that searching for an answer “the old-fashioned way” was taking too much time, and I was getting too much of an education on things that didn’t matter.

So, I turned to Google Search. My search queries immediately led me to useful articles in several websites, like Stack Overflow. I had to rephrase my queries in various ways, but with each new query I saw encouraging signs that I was getting closer to what I was looking for. I eventually found the information that helped me to resolve my problem, in far less time than I had already spent reading the documentation.

Later in the day, I found myself musing about how much the internet search engine has changed the way we live and learn, forever. It has significantly changed the way we get information. We’re no longer content to “open the book” or “sit in the classroom” and read sequentially from the Preface to the Index in our search for understanding. We want immediate answers to our questions. We expect the answers to be pertinent, well presented and easy to understand.

I realize that this isn’t just about our desire for instant gratification. It’s still important to do research and study to get a deeper understanding of a subject. But we are all busy people, and we’re expected to do more things in less time. And we’re expected to be productive even when we don’t have complete mastery of a subject. 

The reason we use Google when searching for the answers to our questions is because we don’t have time to do extensive research on a topic to solve a problem. Because there is no shortage of problems to solve. And new problems happen every day.  

I once heard someone say: “We don’t have time to build a rocket ship to solve this problem. We just need to solve it.” It was a way of saying that, in the process of getting a job done, its okay if we learn only the minimum necessary information about a given topic. And if we want to know more, we can ask always more questions, in an iterative way, in order to broaden our understanding.

The user interface of Nastel’s XRay is based on these same principles. XRay has an English-like query language and a convenient query editor that helps us in our quest for understanding. And it delivers pertinent results instantly. Just like Google Search.

Every time you search, there are thousands, sometimes millions, of bits of data that contain helpful information. The way XRay figures out which result to show start long before you start typing queries. Built into XRay’s micro-services architecture is an enterprise search platform. Its many features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing and dynamic clustering.

Before you search, XRay organizes and indexes the information in its rich NoSQL big data repository. When working on your query, XRay’s search algorithms sort through a multitude of data points to find the most relevant, useful results for what you’re looking for.

To present the information in a way that you can easily understand, XRay provides results in many useful formats and charting options. Whether presented as a table, scorecard, pie chart, stack chart or some other graphical option, XRay enables you to view and consume analytical information that can be understood at a glance.

There are lots of consolidated data analytics platforms available in today’s market. Commercial and open source offerings abound.  All of these solutions offer different approaches to solve the same kinds of problems, and compete in terms of features, usability and cost of ownership.

Customers typically choose one or the other based on how their organizations are structured and how much time they can afford to devote to analytics. One of the most important criteria in choosing the analytics tool that’s right for your business is the size of the learning curve that is required to achieve productivity with the tooling.

When reviewing the documentation, online “how to” guides, and web articles of many of these tools, I’m often surprised at the level of knowledge and skill that is required before the average user is able to achieve even the most modest results. This makes me think: “I don’t have time to build a rocket ship to solve this problem. I just need to solve it.”

This is why I encourage anybody who reads this article to download and try Nastel’s XRay today. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out just how quickly Xray can help you to find answers to your questions.    

Nastel Technologies uses machine learning to detect anomalies, behavior and sentiment, accelerate decisions, satisfy customers, innovate continuously.  To answer business-centric questions and provide actionable guidance for decision-makers, Nastel’s AutoPilot® for Analytics fuses:

• zAdvanced predictive anomaly detection, Bayesian Classification and other machine learning algorithms
• Raw information handling and analytics speed
• End-to-end business transaction tracking that spans technologies, tiers, and organizations
• Intuitive, easy-to-use data visualizations and dashboards