Enabling Breakthroughs for Government with a Cloud Native Data Platform and Analytic Process Automation

From IC Insider Alteryx

By Andrew MacIsaac, Director, Solutions Marketing, Public Sector, Alteryx, Inc.

The US Federal government has created a Federal Data Strategy around the well-recognized concept that data is an increasingly valuable and strategic asset for organizations. Data in its multiple formats is being generated and captured across systems in greater volumes and at increasing levels of granularity. And while the volume of data is accelerating many organizations are struggling with the double side threat of inefficient manual processes needed to organize data and get it ready for analysis and not having enough skilled data resources to get all the analysis done. This is creating more demand in organizations to streamline the access to data and build a robust self-service analytics capability that can drive business outcomes.  Alteryx and Snowflake are leading technologies addressing these two challenges. The Alteryx APA Platform provides organizations a unified, human-centered platform experience that automates access to data, analytics, data science, and process automation all in one, end-to-end platform. Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance.

Snowflake’s cloud-native data platform coupled with the Alteryx Analytic Process Automation (APA)  Platform offers a scalable, governable analytics and data-centric process automation solution for the entire enterprise. Users with different skills and needs across the enterprise can work together using hundreds of Alteryx automation building blocks with Snowflake’s platform services to bring data-driven projects of any size into production.

Outcomes with Seamless Sharing

In short Alteryx and Snowflake is the easiest way to drive analytic and data science outcomes from data in the cloud.  Additionally, Snowflake’s Cloud Data Platform together with Alteryx help federal agencies support the public by delivering a single source of truth for data and the ability to generate data insights quickly and easily for decisions related to federal policies and programs. Federal agencies can leverage the full power of their data assets via Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, which allows for the seamless sharing of data within and between organizations, in a scalable and entirely governed environment.

In-Database Advanced Analytics

With Alteryx Snowflake environment can benefit a wide array of in-database advanced analytic capabilities and data science use cases. Alteryx extends the value of Snowflakes’ rich and secure capabilities by opening the aperture of  robust data science to an expanded class of data workers including business analysts,  domain experts, citizen data scientists and traditional data scientist, who may not have deep SQL coding skills.  With In-database / pushdown capabilities all types of government data workers can engage with large robust datasets within a no-code / low-code environment and execute their workflows transactions with speed.

Integration From the Start

The integration between Alteryx and Snowflake takes place in in five key areas.

1. In-database – The Alteryx in-database tools inject SQL for execution in the Snowflake data platform.
2. Read/write – Alteryx can read data out of the Snowflake data platform and write data in
3. Bulk loader – Alteryx has a bulk loader for moving large datasets into the Snowflake data platform.
4. Snowflake Data Exchange – Alteryx connects easily to the Snowflake Data Exchange, making it easy to combine third-party data from the exchange with customer data. Note, this is not actually a separate connector but instead functions with the standard read/write and in-database capabilities.

With Alteryx and Snowflake, government agencies have a powerful, modern data solution to ultimately help them better accomplish their missions related to the health, safety, and support of citizens through data-driven insights.  In a recent article posted on CDO Trends, Colleen Kapase VP of Global Alliances at Snowflake said “Our partnership with Alteryx can help make scalable analytics and data science on Snowflake more accessible to citizen analysts across an organization, to help drive business outcomes,” and “as demand for analytics and data science on Snowflake increases, partnerships with organizations, such as Alteryx, help us serve customers globally and supports our mission of mobilizing the world’s data.”

Experiencing the benefits of Alteryx and Snowflake

In one example a government organization in Australia was bogged down in many manual processes running in Excel, Java, and SQL as they attempted to run an analysis for anomaly detection. The manual nature of the analytic work meant that any meaningful analysis would take months of work and would seriously impact the productivity of the data team, taking away focus from other important work.

The data team learned about Analytic Process Automation and built up the strength of the data platform adding Snowflake to organize their disparate data. With these two vital components  they believed they had a way forward to complete a timelier analysis for anomaly detection. With the creation of a few macros the required data in Snowflake was ingested into Alteryx for in-database processing.  With Alteryx the team was able to automate the heavy lifting of prepping, blending, and joining multiple data sources for analysis. With the data ready for analysis the Alteryx unified analytics platform enabled the team to conduct extensive analysis and create insights that could be shared directly Tableau for visualization.

With automation and the right technology stack this government organization’s data team of four  is doing the work of twenty analysts, while operating in a self-service capacity that preserves valuable IT cycle. With agility of Alteryx the work the team is doing can be shared and repeated and adapted to other business challenges. You can read more about the Alteryx and Snowflake story here.

Want to learn more?

Download the Best Practices for Using Alteryx with Snowflake guide to understand:

• How to supercharge your analytics workloads by unlocking the near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance of Snowflake with the Alteryx In-Database building blocks.
• Where to use Alteryx In-Database building blocks in place of Standard building blocks to optimize your analytic workloads.
• Insights on developing your analytic workloads to take advantage of the unique capabilities of each platform.

About Alteryx, Inc.

Revolutionizing business through data science and analytics, Alteryx offers an end-to-end analytics platform that empowers data analysts and scientists alike to break data barriers, deliver insights, and experience the thrill of getting to the answer faster. Organizations all over the world rely on Alteryx daily to deliver actionable insights. For more information, visit www.alteryx.com.

Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc.

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