The document discusses the benefits of self-service business intelligence (BI) and data-driven organizations. It notes that self-service BI allows users to access and analyze data with less dependence on IT, which streamlines processes, makes business and IT more productive, opens analytics to more users, and helps organizations become more data-driven. The document also uses Twilio as a case study, explaining that Twilio provides a communications API and has evolved its data use from engineers writing custom queries to using a modeling layer to reuse logic on underlying data.

1. The Business Benefits of a
Data-Driven, Self-Service BI
Organization
Fern Halper
TDWI Research Director for
Advanced Analytics
@fhalper
June 23, 2015

2. Agenda
• Trends in data access and self-service
• Twilio case study
• Round table discussion
• Audience Q&A
2

3. Analytics Drive Value
3

4. The situation in many
businesses…..
4
IT

5. What is self-service
BI?
5
Self-service BI allows users to access and
analyze data with less dependence on IT

6. Part of
democratization trend
• Ease of use
• The emergence of the business analyst
as the user and even model builder
• Data access and preparation
• Analytic platforms
6

7. Benefits and issues of
self-service BI
• Benefits
• Streamlines
processes
• Makes business and
IT more productive
• Opens up analytics to
more users
• Organization becomes
more data-driven
• Issues
• Data management
• Governance
• Shadow IT
• Training
7
pros
issues

8. Self-service BI status
8
(source: TDWI ,2015 ETM BPR, subject to change, n=234)

9. Organizations want
self-service
• Self-service data “discovery” is very
important to many organizations
• Some organizations are even planning
self-service data access on platforms
like Hadoop
9

10. “We found that we’d add a lot
more value back to the
organization if we gave it to
everyone.”
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12. Additional Questions?
www.looker.com
zach@looker.com

13. what is twilio?
Twilio provides a
communications API that
enables phones,
messaging, and VoIP to be
embedded into web,
desktop, and mobile
software.

14. what is twilio?
Developer
purchases
phone number
Calls and
messages are
routed into
Twilio
Developer’s app
responds

15. data use at twilio
• Incredibly rich dataset
• calls / messages / communications!
• lots of different dimensions
• Data needs diverse across the company
• financial reporting
• engineering - performance, reliability, quality
• carrier analysis
• marketing, sales, product, etc.

16. evolution
• 0 - data need determined, engineer writes query
and web interface (slow turnaround)
• 1 - data shipped to 3rd party vendors promising
one stop reporting and insights (inflexible tool)
• 2 - data generally available in s3 / sql data
warehouse (good if you know what you’re
querying)
• 3 - modeling layer to reuse logic on underlying
data

17. ETL
twilio Data
Warehouse
LookML
manual
download
vlookup
SalesForce csv
Optimizely csv
mixpanel csv
Before
After

18. current day arch