Adobe Analytics Requirements and SDR in Workspace
Those who know me, know that I have a few complaints about Adobe Analytics implementations when it comes to business requirements and solution designs. You can see some of my gripes around business requirements in the slides from my 2017 Adobe Summit session and you can watch me describe why Adobe Analytics Solution Designs are often problematic in this webinar (free registration required). In general, I find that:
- Too few organizations have defined analytics business requirements
- Most Solution Designs are simply lists of variables and not tied to business requirements
- Often times, Solution Designs are outdated/inaccurate
When I start working with new clients, I am shocked at how few have their Adobe Analytics implementation adequately organized and documented. One reason for this, is that requirements documents and solution designs tend to live on a [digital] shelf somewhere, and as you know, out of sight, often means out of mind. For this reason, I have been playing around with something in this area that I wanted to share. To be honest, I am not sure if the concept is the right solution, but my hope is that some of you out there can possibly think about it and help me improve upon it.
Living in Workspace
It has become abundantly clear that the future of Adobe Analytics is Analysis Workspace. If you haven’t already started using Workspace as your default interface for Adobe Analytics, you will be soon. Most people are spending all of their time in Analysis Workspace, since it is so much more flexible and powerful than the older “SiteCatalyst” interface. This got me thinking… “What if there were a way to house all of your Adobe Analytics business requirements and the corresponding Solution Design as a project right within Analysis Workspace?” That would put all of your documentation a few clicks away from you at all times, meaning that there would be no excuse to not know what is in your implementation, which variables answer each business requirement and so on.
Therefore, I created this:
The first Workspace panel is simply a table of contents with hyperlinks to the panels below it. The following will share what is contained within each of the Workspace panels.
The first panel is simply a list of all business requirements in the Adobe Analytics implementation, which for demo purposes is only two:
The second panel shows the same business requirements split out by business priority, in case you want to look at ones that are more important than others:
One of the ways you can help your end-users understand your implementation is to make it clear which Adobe Analytics variables (reports) are associated with each business requirement. Therefore, I thought it would make sense to let users breakdown each business requirement by variable as shown here:
Of course, there will always be occasions where you just want to see a list of all of your Success Events, eVars and sProps, so I created a breakdown by variable type:
Since each business requirement should have a designated owner, the following breakdown allows you to see all business requirements broken down by owner:
Lastly, you may want to track which business requirements have been completed and which are still outstanding. The following breakdown allows you to see requirements by current implementation status:
Maximum Flexibility
As you can see, the preceding Analysis Workspace project, and panels contained within, provide an easy way to understand your Adobe Analytics implementation. But since you can break anything down by anything else in Analysis Workspace, these are just some sample reports of many more that could be created. For example, what if one of my users wanted to drill deep into the first business requirement and see what variables it uses, descriptions of those variables and even the detailed settings of those variables (i.e. serialization, expiration, etc…)? All of these components can be incorporated into this solution such that users can simply choose from a list of curated Analysis Workspace items (left panel) and drop them in as desired like shown here:
Granted, it isn’t as elegant as seeing everything on an Excel spreadsheet, it is convenient to be able to see all of this detail without having to leave the tool! And maybe one day, it will be possible to see multiple items on the same row in Analysis Workspace, which would allow this solution to look more like a spreadsheet. I also wish there were a way to hyper-link right from the variable (report) name to a new project that opens with that report, but maybe that will be possible in the future.
If you want to see the drill-down capabilities in action, here is a link to a video that shows me doing drill-downs live:
Summary
So what do you think? Is this something that your Adobe Analytics users would benefit from? Do you have ideas on how to improve it? Please leave a comment here…Thanks!
P.S. To learn how I created the preceding Analysis Workspace project, check out Part Two of this post.
