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So far I have been writing about some of the steps we are taking to launch dablr.io, and the ups and downs founders go through. But what actually is this new software from dablr? How does this product help data teams?
Fact 1:
The analytics software landscape is huge: $24.5 big ones, with a capital-B.
Fact 2:
The analytics software landscape is a mess — behold the The 2021 Machine Learning, AI and Data (MAD) Landscape from Matt Turck (it’s an awesome piece of work the Matt puts out):
You can take a better look at Matt Turck's work here: https://mattturck.com/data2021/
Essential Question
There are literally hundreds of different software solutions listed in the MAD Landscape. Most large enterprises will be running at least one of each from most categories on the MAD Landscape. With all this software, how does a data team (BI team) bring it all together so they are actually harnessing all that data goodness, enriching it, and turning it into insights gold?
Well, the truth of it is that us data people are actually not so good at the insights piece. Sure, we are great at building, but we are so busy stitching tech together that we don’t have time to actually look at the data.
We are so busy building, we aren’t doing any insights work.
— quote from an actual customer of ours
What is the answer? How can data teams get better at being insightful? Are there technology solutions that not only complement the significant technology stacks we are developing, but assist organizations develop their cultures of data driven decision making?
Collaboration — dablr important feature #1
The lineage of any insight traces back to a cross-functional team working together to understand a pressing business problem and deliver some quantifiable insights that provide context, and explains where and how a performance indicator is changing. These cross-functional teams need to rapidly assemble and bring their differing skills to bear in an iterative process that requires discussion, refinement, and process to go from question to discovery to insight.
But how? It seems to me that every other team has an essential collaboration platform that is optimised for their workflows:
Bring on collaboration for data teams
We provide an outsourced data & analytics platform for large pension funds. We have a mix of user types and capabilities, from data analysts, to execs, to operational business users, and data scientists. To manage these communities of users, and best serve these different personas, we developed dablr as our collaboration platform to engage and serve our customers, all of them, all their differing backgrounds and needs.
Netflix for analytics
At the start, we put a JavaScript wrapper around a customers collection of Tableau dashboards for the sole purpose of personalizing the dashboard experience for each user. This soon turned into a personalized analytics experience similar to how Netflix works in your household. Users have their own home screen with recommended content (reports, dashboards), insights, and chat topics of interest. This solves the problem about where to find the right content, especially considering most large organisations are running 3 or more business intelligence systems. Combine that with excel and PDF reports, decks, and file systems, dablr’s first goal is to make access easy for every type of user.
Workflow — dablr important feature #2
Our users often get stuck while looking at different dashboards:
This number doesn’t look right!
How do I figure out the answer to my business question?
Where is the KPI that helps me understand… retention?
I need a new view of this data?
I want to share a discovery I have made.
These are just some of the typical scenarios that block users who are looking to make data-driven discoveries. Most companies we see (and survey) force their users to send an email enquiry, or log an IT Helpdesk ticket, or they have tried to customize Sharepoint for users to raise these questions. We use Jira in our software engineering team, but would never want to put the very technical user experience of Jira on our business users. So, we have developed best practice workflows in-app — yessir and madam, within dablr, these analytics specific workflows are available to users as they look at dashboards.
What is really cool about this in-app experience…. well it does remove intermediary software and increases engagement, but the really cool part is that dablr does it so effortlessly. See the workflows are now object model and contextually sensitive. Our workflows relate each dashboard object with a user, with a specific workflow. So when our users are talking about data, they are doing it in a very specific sense. This connects diverse groups, and protects data analysts and technical BI teams with easy-to-use workflows that give them the right information, in the right way, every time.
We like to think it moves data teams from being reactive, to a calm managed process that provides a rich insight into the hearts and minds of their business customers. Plus, they don’t have to manage clunky collections tools that are not designed for analytics communities. For me, I now see a whole lot more dialogue from our users. Previously, these requests would be hidden from me in other email and ticketing systems, now it is right in front of me. This gives us the chance to be more responsive and connect us to very appreciative users.
What else is in our Analytics Collaboration platform?
I won’t go into all the features we have built into dablr, so here is shortlist to give you a flavour about what is important for our communities of users, and hopefully resonates with some of the daily challenges you experience as a data or business analyst.
One collaboration platform for your data teams and your analytics tools, dashboards, reports and insights.
Collaborate
Data driven cultures talk about data — empower your community with in-app chat and collaboration tools that connect teams to surface insights across the enterprise.
Engagement
Prompt, track and lift your user’s engagement with data to deliver a higher ROI on your investments in data assets.
Personalised Analytics
Deliver curated and automated insights and content recommendations to your community of users based on job context with a smart analytics platform.
External insights
Go beyond your corporate firewall to securely enable your partners to engage with dashboards and insights.
Our mission
Across the enterprise there are diverse teams working with data: data engineers, analysts, scientists, custodians, BI developers, and a range of business users with very different levels of data literacy skills. At dablr, our mission is to connect these teams and bring efficiencies to the way these teams work. We do this with an amazing personalized digital experience that brings an organizations’ analytics tools, content and diverse users together, with workflow and collaboration tools specific to the needs of data workers.
A culture of data driven decision making is based on vibrant communities of knowledge workers that talks about data, and is insight driven.
Our vision for dablr is to be the Slack/Jira for analytics communities. Our goal is to bring efficiencies to data teams with workflow and collaboration tools specific to analytics.
