Item: ThoughtSpot
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization has had the ThoughtSpot appliance on-prem for about a year. ThoughtSpot hosted a workshop with each division within our organization to establish viable proof of concepts (POCs). Through the workshop, we were able to rank the POC options and then execute an SOW for our most viable option. By the time the SOW was completed, that particular division was "all-in" with the application. It has been extremely helpful for the division in answering questions using the data we already have within our databases. We think of ThoughtSpot as a compliment to Tableau. Tableau does beautiful things with visualizations, but it can only answer specific questions as the designer created it. With Tableau, we can drill down as the answers create more questions without having to continue to recreate new dashboards. That has been the most helpful aspect of the application for our users. Since the first POC was so successful, we engaged ThoughtSpot for a second POC/SOW with a different division that we felt would be the most challenging. We completed that second POC even more smoothly than the first. If we can implement ThoughtSpot in our most challenging division within the organization, then we can use it anywhere.

Pros and Cons

Ability to drill down into questions on the fly.
Easy-to-read pinboards for non-technical executives, including natural language questions.
Ability to join multiple databases so data can be analyzed across the organization.
SpotIQ: showing us insights to our data that we didn't even think to ask about.

The visualizations aren't quite as clean as other leaders in the viz space.
Difficult to customize the visualizations.
The application is still in its younger years and still needs more time to be fully developed.

Return on Investment

Positive ROI immediately seen for first POC.
Saved an immense amount of time for a sole analyst on a team by enabling the end-users to ask their own questions instead of always turning to her, allowing her to focus on other priorities.
Immediate answer to question on second POC that led to personnel changes.

ThoughtSpot Time to Value

The implementation process that ThoughtSpot uses for standing the application up and getting it into the final user's hands is about six weeks. We thought this would be near impossible considering the other priorities our teams had, but we managed to have an end-user training in exactly six weeks. With that said, we didn't yet have the data refresh automated, so the users loved it for that first two weeks and then the data became old, quick. It took us several more weeks to get the data refresh automated. Once that happened, the end-users began working in the tool more frequently. Getting the natural language to a point where people will use it easily takes more time as well. We have been working on synonyms for at least five months and we are still not to a point where we feel comfortable that we have most of them done. With that said, I don't see that as a negative. Adding synonyms, formulas, and pinboards is an ongoing process that we may never fully complete.

ThoughtSpot Accuracy

The answers are 100% accurate because we are 100% confident in the data. ThoughtSpot doesn't answer questions on its own, nor does it pull answers from other sources other than what you feed it. Therefore, the answers can only be as accurate as the data you provide it. We are confident in our data sources, therefore we are confident in the answers we receive from ThoughtSpot. With all that said, I will point out that we did test this. We received the answers from ThoughtSpot and then checked those answers against our traditional way of analyzing the data. We received the same results each time.

Usability

ThoughtSpot is extremely easy to use from a frontend perspective. With that said, it does take training and time to adapt to the UI. If you don't have proper synonyms established, then asking questions may be difficult if you don't know how the data is stored. For example, in order to ask a question, you have to know what the column is called where that particular piece of information is stored. Some users in our organization don't necessarily know how the data is broken down. Therefore, we have to spend a significant amount of time thinking about how to best utilize the synonyms so that executive-level users can ask natural language questions.

ThoughtSpot Spot IQ

Our organization loves the idea of SpotIQ. It's so amazing to see how fast the application can analyze billions of rows of lines and come up with insights. We have enjoyed seeing the insights, but we haven't seen any in particular that have struck us as something we didn't already know. However, we fully believe that one day we will find that diamond in the rough, which is why we will continue to utilize SpotIQ.

Likelihood to Recommend

The most impressive part about ThoughtSpot is the people. Every ThoughtSpot employee that we have encountered has been incredibly helpful and genuine in their desire to help us make the most of the application. They weren't just there to sell us a product and then leave us to our own devices. They truly want to make sure that we are successful in our implementation and that we are getting the most out of the application. Their implementation process is super clean and they maximized the time with our engineers to ensure that our infrastructure was best suited for the appliance. And while they would prefer to work in the cloud, they understood our desire to be on-prem and knew exactly how to work with hour specific architectural structure. They trained our team so well in how the appliance works that we were able to handle the next implementation with little support from the ThoughtSpot engineers. Yet, they always made themselves available to us when we got stuck on something.

ThoughtSpot: Easy installation and immediate application

Overall Satisfaction with ThoughtSpot