Business intelligence and insights using Looker
1. Business intelligence and insights using Looker
When data is in a database, a fair amount of effort and expertise might still be required to uncover insights. This goal can be achieved by using a business intelligence solution. However, the challenge that organizations often face is identifying the right business intelligence solution. Some solutions are too complex and not accessible by those outside the data engineering or data analysis teams. This means other teams have to put in requests and wait for answers, which defeats the purpose of gaining real-time insights. Other solutions let everyone in the business perform their own data analysis, but they can only perform their analysis with a selection of the available data. This means that only a few people, or possibly no one, has a full view of the organization’s business data. Looker is a Google Cloud business intelligence (BI) platform designed to help individuals and teams analyze, visualize, and share data. This includes creating interactive dashboards and reports that are easy to understand and share. By having a reliable authority for business data, anyone on a team can explore it, ask and answer their own questions, and create visualizations. This approach empowers organizations to not just uncover insights but also act on them. Looker supports BigQuery, along with more than 60 different SQL databases. Together, BigQuery and Looker provide rich, interactive dashboards and reports without compromising performance, scale, security, or data freshness. Looker is also 100% web-based, which makes it easy to integrate into existing workflows and share with multiple teams at an organization. So how can Looker be used? Let's explore an example. Diamond Resorts, a global leader in hospitality, offers destinations, events, and experiences to help people recharge, connect, and enjoy. They had previously used a mixture of complex Excel workbooks and legacy BI tools to track important metrics. Each business unit operated and ran their own siloed data initiatives. As a result, there were: No common view of business or single authority for common metrics Redundant data engineering efforts, because work was never shared or used across the organization And inconsistent project prioritization, because decisions were driven primarily on intuition as opposed to actual data Also, infrastructure did not meet business requirements with: Executive reporting efforts that took months to complete Data that was duplicated across multiple business units without proper governance Multiple reporting tools and data warehouses throughout the business And infrastructure that didn’t support advanced analytics aspirations Diamond Resorts wanted to create a single common cloud-based architecture that was fully-managed; establishing data governance and enabling the business to be more data-driven, while they set the foundation for advanced analytics efforts. They migrated to the cloud and began using Looker to help improve business agility. This decision let them gain access to real-time insights in less than 3 months. It helped them to navigate COVID changes with important operational metrics such as daily booking and cancellations, while it also provided a 360-degree customer view. And in addition to this, manual reporting for the Yield Management team was decreased by hours each day. The chief information officer said, “Projects that we anticipated coming in future years were suddenly ready to be tackled within weeks.” This is just one example of how an effective business intelligence solution can let businesses transform to better serve their customers.2. Let's practice!
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