JOIN 2019, London

What is Join

Join – Tour is a conference for Looker users touring around the World and I took part in the London session on the 9th of April at The Brewery. Looker is a self -service BI tool built for the cloud and, as many cloud services, they are building their own platform capability, building services and integrations to other analytics components, i.e. API integrations, actions, embedding etc.

Join London at The Brewery

The structure of the conference

The structure of the conference was opening and closing keynotes, and then some talks in between, split in:

• Business Cases, where Looker customers presented their success stories and how they used the tool in their organisation driving adoption and achievement. These are quite an interesting way to promote the tools, showing the real world scenario rather than a shiny demo.
• Looker workshops, hands-on sessions to improve Looker knowledge thanks to the experts
• Sessions on specific product features, again from the Looker experts, but this time with presenting the capabilities

What is coming?

I am most excited by the new visualisation capabilities, such as interactivity between Looks (Looker name for a query based report) and cross-filtering, but also the new dashboard filters design. Seems like the tool is moving towards more flexibility in term of visualisation.

I was very pleased to see a talk specifically on visualisation design and considerations about which visualisations to pick depending on the question you’re trying to answer.

Where the analytics world is moving?

I noticed two trends in the data and analytics space, not specific to Looker but generic: the data analyst as data evangelist and BI product as a platform.

Data are like roads. Where we use roads to navigate to a location, we use data to navigate to a decision.
The road analogy highlights the importance of joining up data. A single road only takes us to places between two locations; their real value comes from being part of a network. Data works in the same way: it is not just having more data that unlocks its value, but linking it together. Data is not individual datasets, it is a network

Jeni Tennison, Joining Up Data

More data and more systems mean more connections and the only way to interact with the plethora of SaaS applications that all digital companies use is to build connections between each of them to the others, so the users can flawless navigate and share information between these and enrich the vision of decision makers, avoiding silos where decision are made without the considering the bigger picture.

Data analysis isn’t just about assembling, ordering and interpreting data; it’s also about educating, simplifying, clarifying, and persuading.

Eva Murray, Data Visualization And The Power Of Persuasion

The data analysts are no longer the heroes, providing reports and insights to the whole business, but they are driving business change and supporting more and more people to find the answer to their own questions. With the amount of data ever more increasing, is impossible to capture every data needs, so data analysts need to put in place an infrastructure that has a wide coverage and then empower more and more people to make data-driven decisions with self-service BI tools.