With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.

I did not, yet. Our organization first needs to be transformed.

It's now very easy for non-technical users to "self-serve" and produce the information and gain the insight they need. For example, account managers often deal with customers who have unique needs. These AMs are able to quickly produce individualized "Looks" or dashboards, save them, and send them to internal users along with customers. Of course, we can produce a variety of "standard" reports and dashboards, but giving people close to the business access to what they need without involving data engineers or analysts is a huge time-saver and convenience.

I have multiple product managers and an implementation specialist who build whole dashboards with filtering widgets and multiple visualizations. These are non-technical people implementing new dashboards with new fields or calculations on billions of records, and I don't have to have any data engineering resources involved.

In the past, adding a new dashboard to our product was a multi-week development effort. Now our nontechnical product management and client success teams can create, launch, and maintain high quality dashboards with no interruption to the development team. The time from inception to delivery is the same day. The results are much more clean, interactive, and professional.

Looker Transforms SQL with it’s LookML syntax. Looker provides end-users with visualization tools, Saved as individual “Looks” or grouped into a dashboard, so that it is easy to gain insights about their data. The UI is designed so that these users can easily choose what parameters are relevant to their queries, without knowing SQL to perform analysis. Admin’s can spend more time with advanced queries or thoughtful data visualization because Looker simplifies SQL logic for most queries.

Our BI team, and otherwise less-technical employees, are able to design and schedule their own reports without additional knowledge. They are now able to create a number of more-complicated visualizations, such as churn diagrams and acquisition funnels, which are used to track milestones and immediately spot anomalous behavior.

Looker greatly reduced the strain on the few SQL-proficient people in our organization. People who were previously waiting to receive data can now get it themselves and answer their own questions. The ease with which questions can be answered and explored leads to more interesting questions being asked and data being used more broadly across the company.

No more backlog of simple data pull requests from most employees. Over 100 people are answering their own questions. Even PR loves being able to source their own data to build stories.

It is easier and quicker to find things in the database.