Let Your Data Speak to You – Unlocking Organizational Value with Looker

Author: Wavicle Data Solutions

Expert insights on unlocking your data’s enterprise value with Looker:  A Q&A with Jose Ochoa.

Today, we’re sitting down with Wavicle’s Google Alliance Leader, Jose Ochoa, to get his perspective on the value Looker unlocks for companies working to achieve a “single source of truth” for their data. We also discuss his thoughts on how to plan for and execute on a successful migration to Looker.

  

Q: What are the key reasons businesses choose to migrate to Looker, and what are they typically leaving behind? 

A: Looker solves what often seems like an intractable issue at enterprise scale, whose data is right and why. I’ve sat in multiple board and C-level exec meetings where inconsistent data makes for untrustworthy answers. For example, one business unit will have a particular view of an important metric, like gross margin, and another will have a different view of the same metric. Looker resolves this by bringing all of the organization’s data into one unified, well-governed, and consistent semantic data layer. With Looker, gone are the days of trying to match up disparate data sets and combine insights from siloed analytics that do not align across a company.

  

Looker provides enterprises with self-service analytics based on a single source of truth. It enables all the people across your business to get data where and when they need it so that they can make better decisions for the business. With more consistent data, companies will achieve better performance, alignment, and trust.

 

Q: How important is data modeling and LookML understanding during migration, and how should companies prepare their teams for it? 

A: Data modeling and understanding what your data is saying to you are critical components of planning a migration to Looker. Looker really shines in providing a governed semantic data model that gives people trust in their data. This is enabled by LookML, which is the heart of the Looker platform as it enables analysts to encode business metrics and logic in a single source of truth so that everyone uses the same calculations, no matter where they’re trying to get that data or where they’re asking the questions of the data.

  

It is this core strength that requires teams to be very thoughtful about their data models and how they are governed. This is where Wavicle can help – we enable our clients to think about their data and its uses in a structured and strategic way that unlocks the value of trustworthy data across the enterprise.

  

Q: What are the key steps to ensure a successful Looker migration? 

A: Like anything else, a successful migration requires thoughtful strategy, muscle building, and cost-effective execution. To this end, the key steps to ensuring a successful Looker migration are:

 

• Putting in the time up front to understand which data is critical to your business, who are the key users of this data, and how should this data be governed.  
• Once the initial strategy and assessment are completed, we encourage our clients to start building the muscles for a data-driven culture by selecting an initial set of “quick wins” that can demonstrate the value of having an enterprise-wide single source of truth in a quick and cost-effective manner. To this end, Wavicle offers our EZConvertBI accelerator, which enables clients to take a selected set of data and migrate it to Looker in a quick and automated fashion. 
• Once a client has shown the value of Looker’s unified data model to its key stakeholders (e.g., business users, senior leadership, etc.), we then encourage clients to develop a strategic roadmap for moving all of their data analytics to Looker, eventually unlocking the power of self-service analytics across the organization. This approach enables clients to show value quickly and establish the goodwill and muscle memory required to eventually scale the entire enterprise on Looker’s unified data model.  

 

Q: What are some unexpected costs or time considerations businesses face when migrating to Looker?  

A: The biggest unexpected costs we see are:

 

• Clients not taking the time to think strategically about their future-state data models. 
• Clients not being thoughtful about the sequencing of the migration to demonstrate value quickly.  
• Clients not leveraging accelerators to achieve the migration in a quick and cost-effective manner, leading to an overreliance on manual work that can slow down the migration and inflate costs.  
• We at Wavicle can help our clients plan for and mitigate these pitfalls when migrating to Looker.  

 

Q: How should businesses deal with compatibility issues between Looker and other systems? 

A: One of Looker’s greatest strengths is that it is API compatible with any major business intelligence tool in the market. While Looker should serve as your single source of truth, your teams can continue to use visualization tools like Tableau and others as Looker makes its semantic data model available via API. This relieves the need for companies to move all of their data analytics resources to Looker in parallel with moving their data to looker.

 

We hope this conversation has been helpful. Please reach out to our Wavicle team to learn more about how Looker can help you create a unified source of truth for your data and how to unlock its value across your organization.