Data holds the answers for many of the critical questions faced by decision makers today, with the quality of the query determining the accuracy the result. Indeed, many CIOs are recognizing that the ability to ask the right questions can be transformative for their organizations, but the shortage of skilled data scientists is proving to be a barrier to insights for all but the biggest enterprises.

Data visualization vendor Tableau offers software solutions that aim to bridge this talent gap and make information more consumable for business users in the process. Paul Lilford, a Channel Director at the company, is one of the executives who appeared on theCube at the recently concluded HP Vertica Big Data Conference to share his perspective on Big Questions.

Interview with Paul Lilford, Channel Director, Technology Partners, Tableau Software

“From a customer challenge perspective, it’s really about getting to the size of data, all the sources of data … and making the decisions based on it,” Liford explained. “Historically, we look at it as most people make some data decisions, but then they go hunch-based. The thing with Big Data that makes Big Data interesting and it’s gonna make it real is all around combining resources quickly [and] making more and more data decisions driven at a detailed level.”

Lawrence Schwartz, the vice president of marketing at Attunity, has a similar view of analytics. He believes that modern tools for aggregating and processing data provide decision makers with the means to set better priorities and reveal unknown unknowns.

Interview with Lawrence Schwartz, VP of Marketing with Attunity

“When you have the power to move the data to where you need it to get, and you have a powerful analytical platform, you can ask the questions later. Those are different ways to think about it and they offer more flexibility than the traditional model. It allows people to deal with the questions as they think of them and sort through the data,” said Schwartz.

Debra Ann Braun, the head of HP’s Global Information Solutions business, agrees that having the right tools for the job is crucial for data-driven organizations.

Interview with Debra Ann Braun, Director of Global Information Solutions for HP

“The data that we’re collecting and managing and using to help us understand our business is better, we don’t look at it in terms of how big is the data, we really focus on how do we answer the right questions, and we need tools like Vertica to help us manage the process of getting to that data,” she told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante.

What sets Vertica apart from the competition? According to Bruce Yen of Guess, it’s performance.

Interview with Bruce Yen, Director of Business Intelligence for Guess

He reflected that before migrating to the platform his company “had a lot of performance pains with our Oracle systems. We thought you know what, we can’t really grow the business if we keep having these performance issues, our staff is dedicated to performance tuning all the time, our end users – our analysts – they couldn’t ask the right questions with the system that we had because it was so slow.”

Big Questions are a source of competitive advantage for both enterprises and politicians. Chris Wegryzyn, the director of data architecture for the Democratic National Committee, highlighted that discovery is the first step toward integrating analytics into an organization’s decision making process.

Interview with Chris Wegryzyn, Director of Data Architecture, Democratic National Committee

“That was really what we strove to do, to figure out where are all of these distinct buckets of data that for years have been sitting untapped all over the place. How do we bring those together, and then more than that, how we take that and start deriving actual intelligence from it quickly,” Wegryzyn emphasized.