ThoughtSpot customer Kris Curtis, Senior Analytics Manager, Just Eat is among the most gifted people I’ve met at promoting analytics adoption and literacy by making complex concepts relatable and accessible. With Analytics and BI adoption still only at 35% as Gartner points out, while a shocking 67% of data going unused in analytics according to Forrester, it’s fortunate that data champions like Kris are sharing their knowledge and experience to help turn this tide.
Kris played a leading role in Just Eat’s digital transformation, which started three years ago. In his earlier years, however, Kris used to deliver pizzas. When educating people on data, he asks them what they think data and pizza have in common. The answer is that everybody has strong preferences: thin or thick crust; wheat or gluten-free; white or red sauce; and, of course, toppings (ham and pineapple anyone?). Kris maintains that business people have just as strong preferences for data itself and also how it’s presented - from a quick answer to a full-blown report.
Experience Analytics: The Virtual Series
On Friday, 13 November Deloitte hosted the final instalment in its "Experience Analytics: The Virtual Series" - an inspiring five part online event that aims to help organisations to design and build the right skills, approaches, technology and culture in order to become more insight-driven.
On the final day I was lucky enough to introduce and hold a Q&A with Kris, who was the event’s featured guest. During his presentation Kris drew direct parallels between delivering food to hungry customers and delivering data to business and partners. I’ve called out some of the highlights below and strongly encourage you to watch the full session here.
Did somebody say ‘Just-Data’?
Kris’ talk centered on Just-Data, a service launched in 2019 that’s one of the crowning achievements of Just-Eat’s digital transformation. Powered by ThoughtSpot, Just-Data was initially launched as self-service analytics for Just Eat’s Key Account Managers and other business users. After seeing strong adoption internally, Kris and his team knew their partners outside of Just Eat could benefit from the same access to data through search. Just-Data was recently extended to branded restaurant partners, which now use the service to gain a competitive edge. Just-Data helps these restaurant partners understand, for example, which times of day are busiest so they can resource accordingly, and how individual stores are performing. The popular service is now in use by 90 brands in 4 countries.
The “Data Delivery Spectrum”
Kris mapped out what he calls a ‘Data Delivery Spectrum’ whereby data delivered to the business is tailored both in substance and style to each stakeholder’s preferences and roles.
For example, Marketing people might see and want data in the form of email lists for campaigns or ‘customer cohorts.’ Sales, on the other hand, might be more interested in seeing data as trended orders, and view them in dashboards, pinboards, or on a mobile device. Kris explains his teams’ approach to get ‘the right data to the right people at the right time’.
Controlled self-service
Kris explained how he applied the concept of “controlled self-service,” to allow business users to help themselves to the data they need while protecting limited analyst resources. In this model a central team manages data so that business users can securely access clean, reliable, and well-governed data.
Elevating partner relationships
Just-Data applied search and AI-driven insights to elevate the conversation between sales teams and branded restaurant partners. Now instead of discussing status updates - no longer necessary as everybody shares the same view of data - meetings are dedicated to troubleshooting problems and identifying revenue opportunities.
These are just ‘tasters’ from the huge menu of valuable insights that Kris shared in his talk. We also covered several important topics in our Q&A session from what to look for in cloud analytics and BI solutions and how to meet the continually evolving customer preferences. The only thing we couldn’t resolve was the pineapple on pizza debate. We’ll have to leave that for another day!
You can view the entire conversation here.
