Diligent enhances customer governance with automated data-driven insights using Amazon QuickSight

This post is co-written with Vidya Kotamraju and Tallis Hobbs, from Diligent.

In this post, we cover what Diligent was looking for in a business intelligence (BI) tool, and how QuickSight met our requirements. Diligent is the global leader in modern governance, providing software as a service (SaaS) services across governance, risk, compliance, and audit, helping companies meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments. Serving more than 1 million users from over 25,000 customers around the world, we empower transformational leaders with software, insights, and confidence to drive greater impact and lead with purpose.

We provide the right governance technology that empowers our customers to act strategically while maintaining compliance, mitigating risk, and driving efficiency. With the Diligent Platform, organizations can bring their most critical data into one centralized place. By using powerful analytics, automation, and unparalleled industry data, our customers’ board and c-suite get relevant insights from across risk, compliance, audit, and ESG teams that help them make better decisions, faster and more securely.

One of the biggest obstacles that customers face is obtaining a holistic view of their data. To effectively manage risks and ensure compliance, organizations need to have a comprehensive understanding of their operations and processes. However, this can be difficult to achieve. Scenarios such as data being dispersed across multiple systems and departments, or if data is not consistently collected and updated, or if data is not in a format that can be easily analyzed can all present various challenges. To address them, we turned to Amazon QuickSight to enhance our customer-facing products with embedded insights and reports.

Narrowing down the competition

To effectively serve our customers, we needed a platform-wide reporting solution that would enable our users to centralize their governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs, and collect information from disparate data sources, while allowing for integrated automation and analytics for data-driven insights, thereby providing a curated picture of GRC with confidence.

When we started our research into various BI tool offerings to embed into our platform, we narrowed the list down to a handful that had most of the capabilities we were looking for. After reviewing the options, QuickSight was our top option when it came to the ease of integration with our existing AWS-built ecosystem. QuickSight offered everything we needed, with the flexibility we wanted, at an affordable price.

Why we chose QuickSight

There are many data points that can be useful for making business decisions; the specific data points that are most critical will depend on the nature of the business and the decisions being made. However, there are some common types of data that are often important for making informed business decisions: financial data, marketing data, operational data, and customer data.

Translating those requirements into BI tool functionality, we were looking for:

• A seamless way to obtain a holistic and unified view of data
• The ability to handle substantial amounts (over 100 TB) of data
• Enough flexibility to support the changing needs of our solution as we grow
• Great value for the price

QuickSight checked all the boxes on our list. The most compelling reasons why we ultimately chose QuickSight were:

• Visualization and reporting capabilities – QuickSight offers a wide range of visualization options and allows creation of custom reports and dashboards
• Data sources – QuickSight supports a wide variety of data sources, making connection and analysis easy
• Ease of integration – QuickSight fit seamlessly with our existing AWS technology stack with a price that fits our budget

Comprehensive, personalized, customer-facing reporting platform

Today, we’re using Quicksight to create a customer-facing reporting platform that allows our customers to report on their data within our ecosystem. QuickSight helps empower our customers by putting the reporting tools and capability in their hands, allowing them to get a comprehensive, personalized (via row-level security) view of data, unique to their workflow.

The following screenshot shows an example of our Issues & Actions dashboard, designed for risk managers and audit managers, showing various issues in need of attention.

QuickSight has provided a way to enable our customers to bring data and intelligence to the board or leadership teams in a simple, more streamlined way that saves time and effort—by automating standard reporting and surfacing it in a rich and interactive dashboard for directors. Boards and leaders will have access to curated insights, culled from both internal operations and external sources, integrated into the Diligent Boards platform—visualized in such a way that their data tells the story that accompanies the board materials.

For us, the most compelling benefit of using QuickSight is the ease of integration with Diligent’s existing tech stack and data stack. Quicksight integrates seamlessly with other AWS products in our technology stack, making it easy to incorporate data from various sources and systems into our dashboards and reports.

QuickSight was the perfect fit

Our customers love the flexibility with reporting. Quicksight provides a range of visualization options that allows users to customize their dashboards and reports to fit their specific needs and preferences. We love that the QuickSight team is open to taking prompt action on customer feedback. Their continuous and frequent feature release process is confidence-inspiring.

QuickSight helps us provide flexibility to our customers, enabling them to quickly put the right data in front of the right audience to make the right business decisions.

To learn more, visit Amazon QuickSight. Join the Quicksight Community to ask, answer and learn with others and explore additional resources.

About the Authors

Vidya Kotamraju is a Product Management Leader at Diligent, with close to 2 decades of experience leading award-winning B2B, B2C product and team success across multiple industries and geographies. Currently, she is focused on Diligent Highbond’s Data Automation Solutions.

Tallis Hobbs is a Senior Software Engineer at Diligent. As a previous educator, he brings a unique skill set to the engineering space. He is passionate about the AWS serverless space and currently works on Diligent’s client facing Quicksight integration.

Samit Kumbhani is a Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS based out of New York City area. Has has 18+ years of experience in building applications and focuses on Analytics, Business Intelligence and Databases. He enjoys working with customers to understand their challenges and solve them by creating innovative solutions using AWS services. Outside of work, Samit loves playing cricket, traveling and spending time with his family and friends.