Democratizing Data: From a Non-Data/Engineering Perspective
September 24, 2019
Democratizing Data: From a Non-Data/Engineering Perspective

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing
We are beginning to implement it across the organization as a way to democratize access to data. Decentralize the access so that it's not just within the data/engineering team and so that it's accessible and workable for other departments like sales and marketing management to use as a way to power informed decisions as well as identify key insights.
Pros
- Clean UI makes the powerful system approachable and inviting to begin sandbox testing.
- Modular approach. You can pivot and pull and plug away so much. The permutations are endless with lots of visualizations and integrations to keep the data and insights flowing.
- Great for multi-user and getting people set-up across the org.
Cons
- Though the tutorial click through at initial sign-up is done great, I wish there were some additional ways to learn about the product at the early stages. It's almost as if they begin with lots of help and support and then expect you to be great on your own and help becomes overly technical. Probably not bad for data scientists but definitely affected the want to use the tool daily (it kind of plateaued).
- I'd like to see better sales material/education. My org has lots of people familiar with Mode & Tableau, so we wanted to have clearer comparisons of why it's worth switching over to this new tool. Why is it so much better? That needs to be clearer.
- Been slow to get traction in organization which means ROI so far is low, however it's a long game for implementation of systems. Because we are rapidly growing finding solutions that fit us at a particular time while we are a particular size of company with specific needs is really tough. Thus it's a blend of Sigma + my company that makes the ROI challenging to gauge. I think in the right situation this would be the perfect tool that people outside of the engineering team would see as a god send.
- Cost of changing over to Sigma is relatively low, but because we are a lean organization it has taken some significant hours from the engineering team to get connections laid out on the data side. This means opportunity cost. Make sure this is endeavor you're willing to support and able to commit the hours to (as well as prioritize) otherwise you will see it flop.
Against Tableau: the biggest 2 factors that make Sigma a better or easier tool is geo-based visualizations & sharing/reporting transparency (+easiness)
Against Access: There's not much to be said, Sigma's offering is worlds apart from Access. BUT at my previous work (where we only worked with approved enterprise systems) the relatively new and unknown Sigma would not have made the cut. Thus Access, from the familiarity/clout of being a Microsoft product was the winner there.
Against Access: There's not much to be said, Sigma's offering is worlds apart from Access. BUT at my previous work (where we only worked with approved enterprise systems) the relatively new and unknown Sigma would not have made the cut. Thus Access, from the familiarity/clout of being a Microsoft product was the winner there.
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