Big data analytics projects are flailing like asphyxiating tuna; some analysts claim the failure rate has soared to 85 percent. Could it be that the pile of software tools and formulas aren’t letting human ingenuity breathe?

“I think that they’ve got to throw out the old playbook,” said Satyen Sangani (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Alation Inc. “The data analytics playbook was all about providing the right answer — forget about that. Just allow people to ask the right questions.”

Sangani spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the BigData SV event in San Jose, California. They discussed how Alation spreads data competency through organizations.

Instant data gratification

Discovering insights is the smallest part of what Alation’s data cataloging software accomplishes. Its real selling point is that it puts people in the picture with data searches and labeling referencing previous user behavior. The easy interface allows business people and analysts to build community and collaborate, according to Sangani.

“You can think of it as Yelp or Amazon for data and information inside the enterprise,” Sangani said. “We allow people to find data; we allow people to understand the data that they find; and we allow them to trust the data that they see.”

The method involves tracking system logs to see who in the organization is using which data sets and which are popular or “hot,” he explained. It’s a lot like sifting through restaurant ratings on Yelp. “Just like you can say, ‘These are the trending restaurants,’ we can say, ‘These are the trending data sets,'” he added.

Googleability of data is a godsend to large enterprises with up to hundreds of thousands of databases and other jumble to sort through, Sangani stated. Democratizing the data know-how of top analysts makes everyone in the business a potential jackpot hitter.

“If you let people’s curiosity guide them, people are industrious and ambitious and innovative enough to go figure out what they need to go do,” Sangani concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BigData SV event. (* Disclosure: Alation Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE