The first 4 years

Over the last four years, my amazing co-founder, Janice Tam, and I have been running Laneway Analytics, a data and analytics platform for superannuation funds (large pension funds) in Australia.

Things have been going really well. We are now ISO 27001 certified. We run a full stack data and analytics platform. We provide analytics across more than 1 million customer accounts in a large ($3 trillion) growing industry.

But there is one very key lesson we have learned along the way:

It is really, really difficult for regular business users to tap into the rich data their organisations are generating.

Each year, at contract renewal times, we would be planning for a tough conversation with our customers and how we could convince them to keep renewing their contracts. Lots of emotions and questions: fear, what if they churn, how can we quantify and prove the value in our analytics platform, what can we do to keep our customers loving our product, seeing value in it, and renewing.

Renewal and churn is hard. How can you manage it with analytics? Its not like there is tangible ROI you can calculate for the use of data in an organisation. Or is there?

Janice and I decided that one clear way we can demonstrate value to our customers is to show how active their users are. But here is the challenge: how might we track user adoption and quantify user engagement with our platform?

And then we got expansive: what if we could create a new digital experience for knowledge workers (all sorts of people that work with data from analysts to regular business folks) that makes it easy to access dashboards across multiple BI systems, delivers relevant content and insights based on a user’s job context, and creates a massive uplift in engagement? Wow, that would be something!

So, we created Luci: the first truly collaborative analytics portal designed specifically for the needs of analytics— a platform that supports communities of knowledge workers, with workflow that enables an organisation to realise a greater return on their investment in data and analytics by increasing engagement with data and showcasing the great work that analysts like myself and my team produce.