Data Surfing

Data Surfing is always confused with Data Analysis. There is a very thin line between Data Analysts and Data Surfers.

Data Surfing is normally done by non-technical people like management who doesn’t know how to write any kind of code to access data at database level.

Data Surfers normally stays at the level of Dashboards and Reports where they just click here and there to explore data for required information.

Business Intelligence (BI) tools came into being to cater Data Surfers World where data was required to be presented for non-technical people who could view data for decision making.

Era(s) for Data Surfers

• Static Reports: In the beginning, business users used to share their data requirements with IT who then used to create dashboards and reports. Those dashboards/ reports and data was not changeable, it was in paper format or in excel format or in text format etc., means after Go-Live if business want one more column or if latest data was required then the whole development cycle had to restart from scratch.
• Dynamic Reports: In the second era, BI tools came-in to cater for this gap. To start with, dashboards/ reports were still not changeable, but data was directly connected with backend databases, so data was always latest at front-end. This was a huge jump, as now, to view new data developer don’t have to recreate front-end again and again.
• Adhoc Reports: Latest era is where dashboards/ reports are also changeable. Now, end users and management can drag and drop tables and columns in dashboards/ reports.

The latest era introduced the requirement for semantic layer (there is a separate topic on semantic layer) due to which Data Surfers experience got better, and better.

Another very simple example can be Web Surfing, where all of us surf Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook like applications every day and sometimes all day. Please note when surfing these applications, we don’t change any data, we just view and try to find information we need. Same way, in Data Surfing ideally data is not changes rather only viewed to make sense and extract of the information hidden underneath it.

Please don't mix data generated by others vs data generated by yourself. Data Surfing on data generated by others.