By providing sophisticated analytical features and algorithms in an easy-to-use self-serve environment, the enterprise enables business users to perform data preparation and test theories and hypotheses and prototype on their own. Rather than preparing data at the central meta-data layer, and restricting what business users can do and see, IT enabled (rather than IT controlled), self-serve data preparation allows users to compile and prepare data and use that data in analytics to test hypotheses, perform visualization and create and share reports, and create custom alerts and other information. Business users can control the data elements, the volume and the timing.