For some time now, we've been looking at including Google spreadsheets as one of
the data sources that SiSense Prism supports. We've just launched this, in a public beta,
and I wanted to tell you why I think this is an important move.
Our
philosophy is to support as many data sources as possible. We want to enable the
user to do IT-less business intelligence: analytics, charting and dashboarding,
on any data source. In the future we'll mash up the different data sources,
catapulting everyone into business intelligence heaven….
Google
spreadsheets is a unique & interesting data source: an online, sharable
spreadsheet.
These features promise real operational value. Let's talk about a
use case.
Well…
as Jonathan Rochelle and Nir Bar Lev blogged on the official
Google blog, there are many uses for Google spreadsheets:
"Sure, there are definitely
favorite themes -- sports, finance and, yes, knitting -- but then the examples become so particular to
the people and groups who are using them: The beer taster's results. The nursery school class
schedule. The biker's riding log. The family reunion plan. The
ski-trip sign-up form. Endless examples, all of which, to spreadsheet junkies
like us, are interesting".
Let
us try an example: A small business decides to use Google spreadsheets to unify
data from its small business CRM and financial systems. It doesn't want
anything fancy: just the top grossing products as sold by the top ranked
salespeople. Or perhaps, top financially contributing customers. Google
spreadsheets is a classic for them: they can unify the data and share it in
real time, and this requires no IT. But…. Google spreadsheets has little in
terms of charting and even less in terms of analytics. No pivot tables… no KPIs
(key performance indicators, in our case "contribution per
customer"). No filters (top sales people as measured by some value). How can they do this? They were planning on
distributing the resulting dashboard to the salespeople, so they see how they
measure up.
SiSense
Prism, as you've probably guessed, does all this and more. It really delivers
on providing analytics and charting in a way that really requires no IT and no
programming or scripting. You just need common sense. In our use case, each of
the traveling salespeople can then check the KPIs or dashboard created with
Prism, using the Google spreadsheets data. He could immediately tell whether he
needs to pound the pavement and look for more sales, or whether he can afford a
leisurely night at the hotel bar…
"OK,
OK" you'll tell me, a bit annoyed, "aren't there pivot tables and
charting for Google spreadsheets?"
Well,
let me explain why I think our new release of SiSense for Google Spreadsheets
is more exciting than that.
Pivots
in Google spreadsheets are limited to the data inside: so a formula like
contribution per customer cannot be done on the business intelligence level.
These are called multi-dimensional formulas. Filters (top 10 salespeople) are
difficult to implement. With SiSense you can do all that. For instance, using
our "filter" feature you can get at a much deeper analytics result,
with no coding, scripting or IT effort. Check out our filtering
feature here. You can easily create a "top ten earning salesmen"
or a "ten best opening lines to sell" as well as a "people who
bought this also bought this" table, "top grossing products"
etc. Doing this with Google spreadsheets today is fairly difficult and would
require scripting, programming etc, as well as purchasing and installing the
middle tier for the data warehouse. At best, in a cloud model, you'd need to
pull in someone that can create a data warehouse for business intelligence.
We
can do this for any user. The reason is that we use Google spreadsheets as a
data source, and query it directly in our in-memory database. We also don't
require that the user "know" how to build an OLAP, or scripting for
BI. From his point of view, we do all of this on the fly, seamlessly and
transparently. Anytime you synchronize with Google spreadsheets, the most
recent data will be reflected in the dashboard (dashboards are authored with a
WYSIWYG interface).
Any
other approach (even in the cloud) will require a programmer to build MDX
queries, create a server etc.
In
the long run, users won't let themselves be limited by the 10,000 row limit on
google spreadsheets. They can "offload" data from last month, and
store it offline. With SiSense they can then join the past and present data,
getting a current and historical perspective on performance, without losing
anything.
Tell
us what you think about SiSense for Google Spreadsheets, or send us your
favorite examples, and we'll feature them on the blog.
