Overview

More and more employees in the enterprise are required to analyse data as part of their job. Employees often have to obtain “responses” from existing data, and they even have to be “curious” and dig into different data sets to find the information required. These “curious” people or roles can include marketing, sales reps, C-level executives, business analysts, and business leaders.

For example, with the knowledge one has in Salesforce about deals, sales reps, customers, and products, a C-level executive may wonder which customers are part of the top ten deals in the first quarter and where they have been closed.

What are the options for people to exercise their curiosity, navigate the data, and find responses to their questions? Today, they are often asked to use fixed or rigid applications where hopefully some menu will drive them to the correct information or access to a prepared report.

In both cases, it is a painful process and there is little chance of success to really get the answers to their questions. In a fixed application, one needs to know the application logic and where to click in the various menus. At the end, the application is probably not covering all the data it needs, as it typically covers only a small silo of enterprise activity. In the case of reports, if a company dashboard has not been created, it could take time to get the answer; even if a dashboard exists among the hundreds already created, one still has to spend time finding the correct one!

This brings about the problems and considerations associated with “cognitive load” (what an employee has to know and learn even before starting to work at getting information) and “affordance” (how ‘natural’ it is to do your task).

At TIBCO LABS, we think that a conversational user interface can reduce cognitive load and augment affordance for those use cases where an employee is looking for a response to a particular question.

These questions can include ones like the following:

• How many deals over 100k have been signed in EMEA last quarter?
• Per business unit?
• How does it compare to last year?

TIBCO LABS started the project by simply assuming that the best way to find the response was to allow a user to ask simple questions:

• How many deals over 100k have been signed in EMEA last quarter?
• Per business unit?
• How does it compare to last year ?

Looks very similar to the sample questions. And this is done without navigating complex menus or searching in a myriad of reports.