Thought Industries has modernized our data collection, preparation, and end-user reporting capabilities using state-of-the-art infrastructure, and best-of-breed business intelligence and reporting capabilities from Google Looker. Doing so provides our customers with reliable, accurate, and timely analytics and insights into their learning initiatives and programs. The new Thought Industries Reporting Hub includes an intuitive and centralized interface, rich data visualizations with pre-built, out-of-the-box reports, along with the ability to personalize and customize reports to meet unique business reporting needs and KPI measurement.
Release Date: February 11th
| General | |
|---|---|
| Question | Answer |
| Why are we changing our reporting structure and navigation? | After numerous customer interviews around our current reporting capabilities, the consistent feedback was that it was challenging to find and get to the data they cared most about. Through extensive user testing with early designs and prototypes, we were able to create a completely new centralized reporting interface (Reporting Hub) that makes it very simple to get to the information our customers need most with fewer clicks. The new Reporting Hub includes pre-built reports with richer data visualizations and key metric call-outs, along with the ability to customize and build new reports providing the utmost flexibility. |
| What is Google Looker? | Google Looker is a market-leading business intelligence tool and platform. We have built our data visualization and end user-facing reporting on Embedded Google Looker, giving our customers access to all of the advanced features and capabilities this industry-leading tool and platform has to offer. |
| Why did we choose Google Looker versus build ourselves? | Given our desire to focus our valuable product and development resources on solving problems for our customers versus reinventing the wheel, it made sense to partner and integrate Google Looker and take advantage of Google’s large and extensive investment and intellectual property in their business intelligence and reporting tools and platform. Additionally, given Google Looker’s adoption in the market, many of our customers are already familiar with and using Google Looker throughout their organizations. |
| What is new and different from our existing reporting capabilities? |
A new, streamlined and centralized interface for all things reporting, the ability to favorite reports, added capabilities for sharing, and the ability to customize, personalize and build new reports from scratch. Note: some of these above features will be available in releases after the initial February 11th launch. Additionally, we have completely rebuilt the back-end infrastructure and software used for collecting our data and preparing it for end-user consumption, ensuring continued scale into the foreseeable future and timely and accurate delivery to customers. |
| What have we done to address data integrity, scale, and latency? | We have completely rebuilt the back-end infrastructure and technology stack used for collecting data and preparing it for end-user consumption, ensuring continued scale into the foreseeable future and timely and accurate delivery to customers. This was delivered October 2020. |
| Are there any changes to BI Connector? | Yes. BI Connector will benefit from the new and modernized back-end data infrastructure. We are working on an upcoming initiative to upgrade this capability to deliver data to our customers in near real-time, versus the once-per-day refresh and synchronization process that is currently in place. |
| Will the legacy reports be available as well as the new reports upon launch? | Yes, legacy reports will continue to be available with the initial Reporting Hub release. That being said, the new Reporting Hub will be presented as the sole source of truth with access to the legacy reports to be sunsetted in April 2021. All the functionality available today within legacy reports will be mirrored within the library of native reports available in Reporting Hub. These new reports will be much easier to navigate and organize, and we think you’ll have a much better experience using the new interface. |
| Will there be additional follow-on releases post the February 11th launch? | Yes. The initial release on February 11th will be followed by additional releases as we add and enhance Reporting Hub capabilities. |
| What additional capabilities will be released post-launch? | We will be following the MVP launch in early February with a number of additional reporting capabilities and features including Scheduling, Sharing, Panorama Reporting Enhancements, Content-Level Reporting Enhancements, Customized Explore Additions. |
| Are there reports available for Panorama clients? |
This initial release is only impacting site-level reports. We understand how important it is for client admins to have more resources inside Panorama reporting, and we are already working on enhancing those capabilities in the near future. Meanwhile, our work on data infrastructure will really improve Panorama reporting access and capabilities. |
| Will custom reports be impacted by this launch? | No, any pre-existing custom reports will appear within the Reporting Hub - classified under either the “Looks” or the “Dashboards” tab depending on its configuration. |
| What are the options for customizing reports? |
With the new Reporting Hub, Thought Industries offers a few ways for admins/clients to customize reports. 1) The new Reporting Hub allows admins to create their own personalized/customized reports easily with the intuitive Explorer option. 2) Our Professional Services team can build custom reports for you with Custom Reporting Services-- which can be scoped and priced with PS. 3) Clients can also use BI tools which allows them to export Thought Industries data into their own systems. |
| Do customers get a license to Google Looker to use independently as a BI tool? | No. Access to Google Looker is only provided through our admin interface in Reporting Hub. |
| Do customers need to be trained in Google Looker to know how to use the reporting functionality? | No. We have designed the Reporting interface for Google Looker to be very intuitive and easy to navigate. There will be general support, Knowledge Center content, and training on Reporting Hub. |
| Using Reports | |
|---|---|
| Question | Answer |
| What is the difference between a “Look” and a Dashboard? | A “Look” is a single visualization that users can add to a "Dashboard", which is a collection of looks or data tiles -- derived from Google Looker, the reporting interface that we use to present program data. |
| How do users manipulate the pre-built standard reports? | Thought Industries has built “out of the box” reports based on commonly used reports and customer feedback, but for those users who need to track data in different ways, customization is pretty straightforward. Users can use Explore to easily select the criteria they want to measure and save these Looks as personal reports, group access reports, or add the data tiles to a dashboard. |
| Is anything being changed for Panorama reporting? | We are currently working on Panorama reporting for a future enhancement and release |
| How often is data refreshed? | With the work we’ve put into the infrastructure, our data refresh will be as real-time as we can get it. Data refresh varies depending on specific data sets, but generally, anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour. |
| How can I share or export my reports? | Reports can be exported via CSV, XLSX, PDF and more. Sharing reports can be done with other colleagues on the platform by adding data tiles to Group Looks or Dashboards or by exporting and emailing the reports/dashboards. |
| Are reports renamed in the new system? | Some report titles have changed as part of this transformation. We have undertaken every effort to ensure that the new experience is much more intuitive and we have mirrored all existing reports. Please reference our Report Name Index to help you navigate these changes. |
| What happens to reports that have already been customized? | Any reports that were previously customized in the legacy system have been migrated over to the new environment. We took care to review custom reports and replicate them using the new data infrastructure and Looker reporting. |
| What if the data is different when I compare my new Looker reports with legacy reports? | With all the work on the data infrastructure, there may be some rare differences. The data has been scrubbed and tested thoroughly over the last several months and so you should feel confident that the data presented in the new Reporting Hub is the most accurate source of truth. |
| Who do I contact if I have an issue or feedback on the new Reporting Hub? | Contact support (support@thoughtindustries.com) for help with using reports. For feedback or ideas, please use this Reporting Hub feedback form. |
| Capabilities | |
|---|---|
| Question | Answer |
| What if I can’t find the report I’m looking for on specific data? | We have organized types of reports into categories so that users can intuitively and easily find the Library Looks that are available. In some cases, titles of reports were tweaked to be more consistent or to better reflect the analytics. We have a list of report titles in legacy and the new Reporting Hub available in Knowledge Center. |
| Can data analysts generate reports with charts and graphs? | Yes, depending on the specific needs, data analysts can choose from a variety of base configurations to start creating a custom visualization. They can save this visualization as a “look” on its own to revisit or add to a larger dashboard with multiple looks. |
| Can reports be exported for use in other tools? | Yes, reports can be exported in a variety of formats to accommodate use in other programs. For a single-data table “look”, these formats include TXT, Excel Spreadsheet, CSV, JSON, HTML, Markdown, PNG. For a dashboard containing multiple looks, this includes CSV or PDF. See our articles on Navigating the Reporting Hub Library or Creating a Custom Report for steps on how to download different reports. |
| How are reports shared with colleagues? | Sharing capabilities are coming soon in a release. This will include sending as well as scheduling. |
| Can I change the colors of the reports to my brand colors? | Yes, when configuring custom looks and dashboards under “Explore” you can customize color choice. |
| Will there be reports for in-platform page views and the central asset manager content? | At the moment we do not report on these areas but are always taking feedback on how to expand reporting! For in-platform page views, depending on how specific the need, we do offer compatibility with tools like Google Analytics. |
| Will the new reporting hub be available to our customers who have access to the client admin role? | No, the Reporting Hub is meant for admins only. Improvements to panorama reporting for client admins will be coming soon. |
| Can we see reports on Admin logs/activity? | Not in this initial release. However, we will be releasing an Admin Actions Log this year. |
| Does the Reporting Hub library have reports that show content actions-- i.e. all content taken from articles to learning paths) during a specific timeframe? | Yes. The Content Actions Log (previously Course Actions Report) contains all actions across all content items. This dashboard includes a timestamp and can be filtered by date range. |
| Looks like the transaction reports capability has changed? | The Transactions report has been removed however this information can still be accessed through the Transactions Log or learner profile. |