Item: GoodData
Rating: 10
Author: Mark Brennan

Overall Satisfaction with GoodData

Pros and Cons

Pros

GoodData puts powerful data visualization into the hands of business users, eliminating IT from the equation.
GoodData required only a brief intro to its basic philosophy, and nontechnical users were quickly able to start building dashboards and views they could actually use.
GoodData enabled powerful graphics to be constructed combining enterprise data and external data such as research or industry data, easily imported and homologated to create comparisons.

Cons

As with many information tools, GoodData can be challenging to a novice user who is too rushed to learn while building.

Alternatives Considered

Birst Analytics
Cloud 9
PivotLink
QlikView

GD is so far my favourite end-user BI tool and eclipses all other cloud tools, while also enabling use of GoodData on top of a corporate 'gold standard' platform such as Business Objects, or just an Oracle based Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to succeed with BI you need to embrace "Laisser Faire BI", in other words put a great product in people's hands and get yourself out of the way. Some formal structure may be necessary in some orgs, but the real adoption curve is driven by demand, not supply.

Using GoodData

Business Processes Supported

GoodData is most popular among "data hound" category of business user. Anyone who is capable of running and refining large Excel pivots, and who can extract SQL statement results into Excel, is easily able to build beautiful analytics and visualizations in GoodData.
Some less proactive GD users are merely consuming the analytics views created by their colleagues.

Innovative Uses

In one customer demo, we used online banking data (yes, for real) and observed as GoodData created different dashboards for different people depending on what it found in the downloaded data. It was very cool. Download 1 full year of online banking transactions into CSV, then create new project using this as base data. Where debit categories were clearly showing a pattern, the dashboard put this item first and showed a pretty useful pattern. where people had variable income and from various sources, it showed that first and created great interest in seasonal variances by source.

Evaluating GoodData and Competitors

Products Replaced

Salesforce reports & dashboards, Excel, SQL commands.

GoodData Implementation

Implementation Rating

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

We let it go viral among the smartest and most data-hungry and analytical people in the organization. That generated some me-too following, and before we knew it we had a Mexican wave. The stragglers too were enthusiastic, especially when they could just use metrics created by their colleagues

GoodData Training

Training Types Used

In-person training
Self-taught

In-Person Training

Petr was a rock star - patient, knowledgeable, clear and easy to work with.

Ease of GoodData Training

It makes you feel smart. You try to build an ambitious metric or graph, and by guessing and using intuition, suddenly you've got it!

GoodData Support

Support Rating

GoodData is still a small, hungry and very capable organization. I do hope while they grow and scale up their operations they will maintain this hungry yet humble culture that is always there for their customers.

Comments

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Good Data = Good Deal