Your data has a story to tell. Are you listening? Or are you forcing it into preset rows and columns? If so, you could be missing out on crucial and valuable information. If you want the most from data, you have to stop seeing it as a bunch of numbers to be logged and allow it to reveal its wisdom to you organically.

JJ Allaire, founder and CEO of RStudio, Inc., said that while templates are great because they allow you to get started easily, they can leave a lot of your data’s story untold. He recommended open-ended tools that allow for your applications to come out in whatever configuration best suits them.

Allaire spoke to John Walls and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Apache Spark Maker Community event in San Francisco. Allaire said that with RStudio’s tool Shiny that “instead of fitting what you’re trying to express into a template,” you can let the data speak for itself, as it were. “Instead, you can create arbitrarily complex or interactive web applications,” he said, adding you can literally create “anything you can imagine.”

Listen first, write later

Allaire said that the very first step in building the best data applications is to parse the narrative around your data. He said with any business intelligence tool, the idea has always been: “I’m trying to make a case for something. I’m trying to tell a story about something.”

He stated that RStudio’s R Markdown allows a small-to-medium-sized data set to tell its story and inform the kind of application you need to write. “It lets you communicate [about data] in a lot of different ways” using visualizations, models, statistics and narratives, he explained. “There’s always a context and narrative around  data,” he said, and you need tools that help you listen to the story to determine where to go next.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Apache Spark Maker Community 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE