Beauty of Data: Insights of our VP Business Intelligence

gohr / 24 Feb 2024

Hi GO-TROOPS!

Having joined GO-JEK since late July of 2015, Crystal Widjaja, also known as Crissy, has documented a lot of data. For her and the BI team, Business Intelligence depends most on the data that they have. A common phrase they use is "garbage in, garbage out". What that means is that if your data is 'trash' –you'll get garbage reporting and metrics out of it.

Clean and understandable data are the primary requirements in Business Intelligence. No matter how good someone is at coding or creating charts, if you don't have the right data to work with, you won't produce anything of value.

So, how does BI team do this? Here are three tips from Crystal about how we should use data to create actionable insights.

Collect As Much Data As Possible

Data can provide insights that help us answer our key business questions such as: Which areas should have rush hour pricing? Which merchants should get special pricing?

That's why, what matters most is the ability to search for data, make calculations on the data, and put it to use in the business. The best way to demonstrate this is to walk you through a Business Problem.

Once we have decided onthe Business Problem, we can start to think of the different ways to solve it. In BI, Crystal and her team work from the problem statement to the solution, where the solution is not only limited to the resources you have or the skills that you have. Anything can be a part of the solution.

Use Design Thinking for Problem Solving

In the BI team, one of the methods they use is design thinking. In using design thinking, we allow ourselves to asses the best, most ideal solution rather than limit ourselves to what can be done with the current resources we have now, hence opening us up to be more creative and to get more things done.

Design thinking is a cross-team process. For example, BI consults with different product owners like Dito from Allocation and Nitin from the Pricing Service team to find out what is and what is not possible from a technical perspective. Usually UI/UX teams are known for using Design Thinking, but do not worry! All of us can use these methods as problem solving processes, regardless our scope or work.

Given unlimited data, how could we start to solve this problem? Given unlimited resources, how could we solve this problem? What are all the human and technical incentives I can use to solve this problem? These are all common questions that are used by the BI team to determing new solutions.

Be Open To Adopting New Technology

Working at GO-JEK means everyone needs to be open to adopting new technology in order to be better and faster than the competition. In BI, they adopted a new technology called S2 (a Google library) taking inspiration from some other products who started it first. Another example is in People and Culture, where we adopted new technology called Workday that could make it easier for us to find out anything we needed related to our employees.

How about you, Troops? Is this article helpful? Share your thought with us with comment below!