The Challenge of Information Self-Service

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Hello, my name is Doug Bordonaro and I want to share some lessons we've learned at ThoughtSpot over the past couple of years about how people access information.

There are a lot of people focused on the challenges brought about by everything that we call Big Data--a term I don't love--and we've spent a lot of time thinking not about how we can make the tools we use better to handle the inundation of information in the enterprise, but rather how to think about the problem in a totally different way.

I'm not here today to talk about ThoughtSpot, but I want to share some of those lessons with you.

we've all seen charts like this showing how much the volume of data in the world has changed over the past 20 years. I'm not here to talk about that, but instead about how we access that data--how we get value from it.

* storage in Exabytes

with all that information, how has how we access it changed?

this is what a report looked like in 1994

this is what a report looks like today

this is what an information architecture looked like in 1994

it's no wonder that we keep talking about this. Technology has made the problem bigger, not smaller.

even the term "big" data is descriptive of the data, not its value.

look at the words that we use to talk about information

and the technologies we use to manage and make sense of the data are all built to be part of a stack

there's no question the technology we use to manage this data is complex, but we need to focus on the point of consumption--making it easier to get value from it. We need to build solutions with the consumer in mind--what they want, how they want to use it, and how it fits in with their lives. It shouldn't be the layers that are important, but the people using them to derive value.

so how do we make sense of all this complexity? is it unachievable?

We need to take lessons from the consumer space

when was the last time you rented a car? did you read the manual?

with complex systems, it's easy to focus on the complexity. But that's a mistake. Who here remembers the EV1, General Motors' attempt at an electric car in the late 90's? It wasn't the first electric car, but it was the first mass-produced electric car of the modern era. This is an actual graphic produced by General Motors when they were trying to sign their first lessees. Are they thinking about the technology, or about the users?

here's a picture of the ev1 today. GM saw it as an unprofitable venture, and almost all the EV1s were crushed in 2002 despite the protests of a few vocal users.

the more focused they are on the end user, the more successful they tend to be

it can be hard to see what cars have to do with information technology, so let's use an example a little closer to home. When was the last time you used Facebook? I can see some of you are using it right now. When was the last time you read the manual?

what about google?

what about amazon?

in fact, in the consumer space if you don’t get your answer in two seconds, studies show you give up and move on.

when was the last time a non-technical end users got an answer from their data in less than two seconds, especially if they had a question that hadn't been asked before? most people are impressed by 20 minutes, and a turnaround time of three weeks for a new information request is pretty standard.

These consumer websites are built with the end consumer in mind, and measure their success by that goal. In the consumer market, you win by providing the best experience and fit, not by edict. in order to meet that goal, they had to think of themselves differently, set entirely different expectations:
page loads in 2 seconds or less
search results in 200 ms or less
leverage common navigation patters
appealing, intuitive interfaces

I wanted to give you one more look at a modern reporting tool before I moved on to the second lesson:

here's another example. Does anyone remember the mp3 players from the late 90s? Hard to load songs, very little capacity, complex interfaces. Technically impressive, but not built with the user in mind.

of course, the ipod replaced them all. apple took something that's actually pretty complex for its time and made it simple by a focus on value over specifications, form as well as function.

steve jobs is famous for disregarding focus groups. he believed that the consumer couldn't tell you what they wanted. not they wouldn't know it when they saw it--in fact he bet his company on that--but that they couldn't tell him.

Think about what that means in the enterprise. we built information products based on requirements. not just reports, dashboards, and analytic answers--but entire systems. if apple's customers couldn't tell steve what they really wanted, why can yours?

I'm not suggesting that you don't listen to or talk to your customers, in fact apple was very successful in the brick and mortar retail space doing exactly that. instead, I'm suggesting lesson #3:

The Challenge of Information Self-Service

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The Challenge of Information Self-Service