TD:LR

What

Information Consumers can quickly search, find and access the Information Products they need to answer their business questions.

This feature enables Information Consumers to search and find all the available dashboards, reports and analytical models in the AgileData App, regardless of what third party Last Mile tool they are created in.

It also enables the Information Consumer to quickly open that report or dashboard directly from the Marketplace, when those reports are accessible by a web URL

Feature Requirement

The system must include an Information Product Marketplace, where users can browse, discover, and access a curated selection of Information Products.

Requirement Rationale

An Information Product Marketplace facilitates the sharing of information assets, enhances collaboration across teams, and provides users with easy access to valuable insights and tools, driving data-driven decision-making and innovation.

How

Why

One of the core principles we decided on when we started building AgileData, was we wouldn‘t focus on building the last mile reporting visualisation tools.  The Visualisation market was very crowded and the cost of developing the table stake features were too high, there were more valuable areas of complexity we could focus our development effort on making simpler.

We also had a bet that most organisations would already have a Visualisation tool of choice and wouldn’t want to use the basic version we would create.  This bet turned out to be wrong as we started to focus on helping organisations who didn’t already have a data team, and typically they also didn’t have a visualisation tool.

In this scenario we started using Google Looker Studio to deliver these visualisations as it was a good tool for the basic stuff, it had no licence cost, it ran as a serverless / SaaS product and lastly it was tightly integrated with Google BigQuery which we use to store the data in AgileData.

The Marketplace feature came as a result of watching how our Customers used, or in this case did not use the AgileData App.

Over the years we have spent a bit of time extending out the Catalog capability in the Agiledata App.  We use the Catalog capability extensively ourselves, as the launching point for most of the Data Work we need to do.

But when an Information Consumer from a  Customer went to use the AgileData App for the first time, they got confused.  They could see a bunch of Tiles that related to the Data Work we were doing for them.  

There were the History Tiles in the Catalog where we stored an immutable and histories copy of the data we had collected from their Systems of Capture.

There were Concept, Detail and Events Tiles in the Catalog which represented tha data in a way that matched was Designed to match their Business Language and make it fit for purpose

There were Consume Tiles in the Catalog, these were the sets of data that could be used to create the visualisations, reports etc.

But the final thing that they actually consumed, the Information Products, were not there and the Information Consumers found that confusing.

We also had a problem were there was no real portal capability in Looker Studio, so it was difficult for Information Consumers to find and use the Looker Studio reports they needed.  We found ourselves constantly emailing URL links to the reports to them.

To solve this our first bet was to enable third party URL’s to be created In the Catalog, as Info App Tiles.  This allowed you to paste a URL to a report and give it a name and a Tile would appear for it in the Catalog.

This resolved some of the issues for the Information Consumer, but they still found the Catalog confusing as Info App Tiles were just one of the many Tiles they could see.

We had a choice where we could have used personalisation to default a filter for the Information Consumer user types when they viewed the Catalog, and only showed them Info App Tiles by default, but instead we decided to break it out to its own top menu, which we named Marketplace.

This was based on a bet that we will extend out the Information Product sharing capabilities in the AgileData App in the future.

When a user who is an Information Consumer logs into the AgileData App, they are now taken directly to the Marketplace screen and are presented with the Information Products they can consume.

From there they can search, find and access any Information Product they need to answer their business question with data and take the action they need based on that data.

All the other user persona’s still get shown the Catalog when they login to the AgileData App.

Keep making data simply magical