Bob Newstadt, Senior Director of Business Intelligence at HopSkipDrive BI/ Reporting/ Business Use Cases Dashboards are fast to build and user-friendly due to great tools such as Tableau. But there are use cases where dashboards are a poor fit. A year ago the operations team at HopSkipDrive demanded a better solution to replace a suite of existing dashboards. Lacking suitable features in existing tools we built a system that sends real-time alerts to Slack channels. The initial project was a success. What happened over the next few months surprised us: users found 30 additional use cases for real-time alerts. Those alerts have become an integral part of the service improving safety and user experience on the platform. In addition, alert volume is used as a measure of defects, a component of our overall service level score. This talk will deconstruct what we learned. • When are dashboards a poor fit? • What use cases are well-served by real-time alerts? • How was the alert service built? • Using alert volume as a defect score.

1. Use Cases Unlocked by
Business Intelligence
Alerts
Bob Newstadt • DataConLA 2022

2. Bob Newstadt
Bob is a data expert with 30 years
of industry experience and 2 CS
degrees. He is currently the
Senior Director of Business
Intelligence at HopSkipDrive.
bob﹫hopskipdrive.com

3. Data
Culture
Business Intelligence
Data
Platforms
Data warehousing
Data integration
Tools
Data
Products
Ad hoc analysis
Reports
Dashboards
Client-facing
Data training
Licenses
Data Gym
Analyst support
Data
Science
Statistics
Model building
Model deployment

4. Alerts!
An alert is an actionable message
pushed to a shared channel enabling a
near-real-time workflow.

7. Dashboards vs. Alerts
Dashboard Alert
Delivery View regularly Arrives when applicable
Information Capacity Dense Sparse
Consumption By an individual By a team
Interactivity Filters Links
Time to action Slow Fast

8. Our BI Alert Use Cases
trip cancels
driver payments
caps enforced
ride notes
AM trips
airport trips
waypoint order
bad address
booster seats
duplicates trips
driver coverage
rider special needs
rider monitors
booster seats
vehicle capacity
Other
Ride Building
Ride Matching

9. The Advantages of Alerts
Better UX
Clear when
there is
work to do
Delivered to
team channel
Discussion
ready
Event detection
is automated
Timely
Saves time
just looking
Consistent
policy
Narrow focus
Breaks
down work
to be done
Encourages a
well-defined
process
Actionable
Too lightweight
Can flood
the channel
False alerts
Need
frequent
tuning

10. How to find your BI Alert use cases?
Look for
processes with
manual
checklists
Tip #1 Tip #2 Tip #3
Ask your
business users
about defects
and dashboards
Build alerts
for the first
few obvious
cases

11. BI Alert Implementation
Alert Script (bash)
─ Business logic encoded in a sql query template
─ Run sql on production replica db
─ Send any results to a Slack channel
─ Log any results to the data warehouse
Scheduler (cron)
─ Runs each alert as needed (eg. every 10 minutes)
Monitor (cronitor.io)
─ Squawks if alert errors, ran long, or did not run

12. Use Alerts to Measure Defects
Visualizations by Cindy Lin

13. Takeaways!

14. CREDITS: This presentation template was created by Slidesgo,
including icons by Flaticon, and infographics & images by Freepik
Thanks!
Acknowledging the critical contributions by Cindy Lin,
Julie Miller, Michelle Levitt, Mike Elder, Sophy Lee,
Jacob Green, Dominic Ferramosi, Corey McMahon
Any questions?
bob﹫hopskipdrive.com