data driven - the ancestry journey - 12-10-14
TRANSCRIPT
Data Driven: The Ancestry Journey to Self-Service AnalyticsAdam Davis – Data Visualization Lead
December 10, 2014 – Salt Lake City
Agenda
I. About Ancestry
II. Our story
III. Challenges & solutions
IV. Successes
V. Future opportunities
AncestryWho we are
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World’s largest online family history resource
5Approx. 2.7 million paid subscribers across all family history sites
Data drives our business
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• 14 billion digitized historical records
• 60 million family trees
• 6 billion profiles
• 200 million sharable photos, documents and written stories
• 10 petabytes of data
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Our storyTableau’s role in the Ancestry data strategy
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Traditional BI tool challenges
• Dashboard bottleneck
- Team of 3
- Analysts wouldn’t use it
- Steep learning curve
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The search for a self-service tool
• Executive challenge to become a data driven org
• Needed to move quicker with discovering and sharing insights
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Self-service options explored
Microstrategy Visual Insight
- Training
- Workshops
Microsoft Power BI POC
- Power Pivot
- Power View
Tableau Evaluation
- 2 week
- 30 desktop users12
Tableau evaluation findings
• 2 weeks
• 120 views created
• Excel users were quickest adopters
• Prizes Awarded
- Most colorful
- Most viral
- Most put together
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Self-Service ModelChallenges & Solutions
Adoption explodes
• In just over 1 year
• 100 desktop licenses
• 8 core CPU server license
(Access for Everyone)
• Over 1500 Views
• More than 450 Workbooks
• Went from struggling with BI tool user adoption to everyone wants to use it.
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How do we avoid the “Wild West” of reporting?
Governance vs. Self-Service
• Extracts
• Projects
• Portal
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Extracts
• Kick off batch file in ETLprocess using Tabcmd
• Update within an hour of Data Warehouse
• Maintained by BI team
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Projects
• Sandbox project for all to use
• Projects for analysts
• Data Portal Project
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Portal
• Consolidate Reporting
• Approved reports by FP&A, Analytics & BI
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Looking for a solution
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Solution
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http://getbootstrap.com/
DEMO: Approved reports portal
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Tableau PublicSuccess with public data
PR Mother’s Day campaign
• Featured in news articles
- Wall Street Journal
- Washington Post
- Time.com
- NY Daily News
• Featured as Viz of the Day on Tableau Public
• Bullet one or paragraph heading
Paragraph 2 contains first bullet point
- Paragraph 3 contains secondary bullet
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PR Mother’s Day campaign
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“Our most talked about and successful campaign.”-Matt
Home Ownership
• Featured in news articles
- Washington Post
- Time.com
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Back for More
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Future opportunitiesWhat’s next
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Vision for the future
• Hadoop & Hive
- Data exploration
• Adoption by additional departments in organization
- Find the “Excel Jockeys” with Big .XLS workbooks
- DNA Science Team
• Expand Functionality
- Metric monitoring
- Server tools
- Future Mobile 33
# of views in 1 year: 1500+
Final ThoughtsKey Takeaways
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Key Takeaways
• Get Desktop in the hands of data driven individuals.
• Find a way to consolidate approved reporting.
• Start using Tableau Public.
• Get out of your own way and let Tableau work.
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