Dashboards Evil? Worth a Thought. Nah, Just Take What Is Output
February 1, 2021
Business intelligence (BI) is jargon for the technologies and strategies used to manage business data analytics. It is a fancy term for standard operating procedures and looks good on a resume, but one IT CEO wants to make it obsolete. Diginomica discusses how BI could head to the recycling bin in the article: “ThoughtSpot CEO-‘I Want To Kill BI And I Want All Dashboards To Die.’”
COVID-19 has changed global business practices and technology experts spent 2020 investigating ways to aggregate business data. ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair explained in the article that traditional aggregation patterns do not apply anymore and companies need to change in order to maintain their customers. Nair believes his ThoughtSpot platform, described as ‘Google for numbers,’ will deliver key insights the same way Google provides information.
Nair pointed out that opinions are easily accessible via a Google search, but facts are harder to find in the endless search results. Nair wants his ThoughSpot platform to make facts as easily accessible as opinions. ThoughtSpot combines hardened facts with a NLP interface to make finding facts easier, think Windows 95 versus the old command land interface:
“ThoughtSpot does this by allowing users to search enterprise data with hyper-personalized questions using natural language processing. It aims to not only give a result for the question you ask, but then also uses AI to offer up alternative questions and results that may be helpful. This is very different to traditional BI, which typically offers you a template for which to present historical, aggregate data.”
In other words, Nair wants to sift the information noise from facts. Today’s BI dashboards offer a plethora of information, but lack personalization notes that could win new customers and retain older ones.
ThoughtSpot will supposedly combine old data with new data to push out BI dashboards and create a new data analytics space for businesses. Nair’s description of ThoughtSpot is an interesting pitch, but it sounds more like a new way to search information. Instead of explaining how ThoughtSpot works it would be better to offer demonstrations of its capabilities.
But thinking? Not the core competency of the thumb typing generations.
Whitney Grace, February 1, 2021
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