Data Analytics Workflow: Before vs After

Metrics Store in Action #1 — 2-minute Tech Tok for 2 years’ Implementation

Lori Lu
3 min readJan 8, 2022
Kyligence — Metric Platform Case Study

This blog series will introduce how a Top Commercial Bank in China has successfully rolled out a self-service metric platform — Pandora, to democratize data across the bank since December 2019. Considering the shrinking human attention span, the story will be broken into bite-sized chunks. Following through this case study, you will see self-service analytics is no longer a myth and is NOT far from “hands-off”.

The Facts about Pandora — by Dec 2021

Total Active Metrics: 9700+
Total Self-Service Dashboards Created: 7k+

Daily Unique Visitor: 5k+
Daily Query Count: 40k+
Daily Query Performance: 90% less than 5s

Data Analytics Workflow: Before vs After

Previously, as illustrated, it typically took 12 workdays to deliver a data product embedded with 50 metrics. Like the traditional dashboard delivery process, it has five phases: requirement clarification, data sourcing, pipeline implementation, dashboard creation, and UAT. The most frustrating part of the entire workflow is that IT engineers have to communicate back and forth to align various business units and get each data owner’s approval to access and collect data. In addition, they are inundated with tedious, one-off projects and repetitive work since the outdated BI architecture was not designed for metric reuse.

Since Pandora goes live, the end-to-end delivery time has been reduced to 5 workdays because 30 out of 50 metrics are already available in the repository and ready to ship, and the other 15 metrics could be derived from the existing ones by applying simple filtering or mathematical transformations. So BI engineers only need to focus on creating the 5 new metrics instead of implementing all the 50 metrics. The improved efficiency also comes from applying the concept of Universal Design — Designing for Everyone in Pandora.

Universal design, as defined by Andrew Maier, is a design methodology that “describes a set of considerations made to ensure that a product, service, and/or environment is usable by everyone, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design”.

by Marsha Chan, from Universal Design for Learning

Pandora has an extremely intuitive user interface that allows non-technical folks to drag and drop ready-to-use metrics to assemble dashboards while IT experts are engineering the 5 new metrics for them. Creating dashboards is now “delegated” to business end-users; as a result, IT departments are free to drive new values.

Bonus: The 15 derived metrics and 5 new metrics — 20 metrics in total will be added to the metric repo as an asset, and other business users could reuse them out of the box in the future.

Quick Links

Enterprise Metric Platform in Action #5

Enterprise Metric Platform in Action #4

Enterprise Metric Platform in Action #3

Enterprise Metric Platform in Action #2

Enterprise Metric Platform in Action #1

BI Dashboards are Creating a Technical Debt Black Hole

How Top Companies Build a Metric Platform

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