What is data preparation?
While data is a valuable asset, it needs to be tuned to the context of the business to be used effectively. Data preparation is a self-service activity that converts disparate, raw, messy data into a clean and consistent view. The process includes searching, cleaning, transforming, organizing and collecting data.
Data preparation accounts for about 80% of the work done by data consumers today, which leaves less time to mine and model curated datasets for business-critical analytics. Many businesses have identified data preparation as a core challenge to deriving value from data, and they are seeking solutions to help speed up the process.
IBM has compiled a holistic portfolio of offerings that use automation to improve and speed data preparation, from the individual stakeholder level to enterprise scale. Continue exploring to find the right scale for you.
Data preparation benefits
Automation of the data transformation process
Use machine learning recommendations to format, join, tag and cleanse data sets. No coding required.
Self-service collaboration throughout the enterprise
Share transformed data sets from any source with others in your organization and with business intelligence/analytics tools.
Connectivity to data governance, lineage, and privacy tools
Work with confidence knowing data is compliant with regulations and can be trusted to drive business value.
IBM InfoSphere Advanced Data Preparation
IBM InfoSphere® Advanced Data Preparation provides self-service access to trusted data and automated transformation to help you start analysis faster and speed up your enterprise data preparation.
More products
Additional offerings that feature data preparation capabilities
IBM Cloud Pak™ for Data
Use this flexible multicloud data platform to integrate all your data — whether on premises or on any cloud — while helping to keep it more secure at its source.
IBM Watson® Knowledge Catalog
Quickly find, curate, categorize, govern, analyze and share business-ready data, using this enterprise data catalog integrated with a governance platform.
IBM Watson Studio
Use AutoAI to help prepare and analyze data to build and train AI models within a multimodal data science environment.
Related data preparation resources
The eight simple building blocks for data preparation
Read this introductory guide to understand how machine learning can accelerate data preparation to achieve business-ready data.
How to Use Data Preparation to Accelerate Cloud Data Lake Adoption
Learn six steps to improve agility, productivity and consistency when preparing data for analytics, machine learning and data visualization.
Deliver business-ready data with intelligent data cataloging and data lake governance
IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog provides a machine learning-powered data governance platform to help with data lake challenges
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