We make use of Thoughtspot in two ways. Firstly, there are various dashboards and answers that different users can put together and refer to on an ongoing basis. Secondly, we use it as a means of exploring an unfamiliar data set or to answer new questions.
The best way to start using this solution is first explore the data and filter it in different ways. Try to develop new insights as you go along. This will help you decide exactly what kind of dashboards you need.
The great advantage of ThoughtSpot is that you can explore data in a new way with very little effort. You don't need anyone's help to build a dashboard or to configure a visualization. You just enter the terms you're interested in, add the filters you need and ThoughtSpot will give you insights.
I've set up dashboards that are designed for use by a few hundred people in our organisation. In terms of future usage of this solution, we're contemplating the move to ThoughtSpot Cloud because that is necessary given our backend migration away from an Oracle data warehouse to Snowflake. On the other hand, there's competing products such as Looker from Google, which our IT team is evaluating.
The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable.
The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot. If they wanted to compete with PowerBI, they would need to improve in this regard. The second thing that could be improved is their SpotIQ. I've tried to use it and is not intuitive.
I have been using this solution for four years.
This is a stable solution. We have not had any outages or problems.
The challenges that I have involve scaling. Managing roles and security for hundreds of users would be a full-time job.
I would rate the technical support for this solution a four out of five.
Personally, I'd been using Tableau prior to starting to using ThoughtSpot. I continue to use Tableau for certain things where control over the appearance of visualizations is more important than speed. I haven't used a product that is comparable with ThoughtSpot before.
Our IT team has been responsible for most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the initial setup. Some of the challenges have included figuring out how to get data from our data warehouse into a table in ThoughtSpot.
Setting up this solution in a cloud based environment is more straightforward. We've got one IT resource dedicated to the solutions maintenance but this is not a full-time job for one person. It doesn't require a ton of support which is a great thing.
ROI is a hard thing to quantify, particularly since the costs are born by one organization and the benefits are reaped by another. In general, we get a lot of value from this solution.
For those who are responsible for choosing which tables to feed into ThoughtSpot and setting up the tables and worksheets, I would recommend figuring out your role level security strategy from day one. Role level security is implemented via joints and in some instances, joints were set up in the opposite direction from what they should have been. This reduced the efficiency of some of the worksheets. Unfortunately, once implemented you can't make a change and have to start from scratch.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
