Budget Season Is Just Around The Corner
With a peak outside my office window, I see leaves beginning to change. But that isn’t the only thing that changes this time of year, the focus of your job may be changing too. Maybe just for a season, but over the next few months some of you reading this may have to plan your budget for 2020 and beyond.
What do you feel your 2020 will look like? Do you have access to the information necessary to be able to even know how 2019 is going or will end up?
Up or Down
Maybe you work in an industry that is seeing a slow decline. With that, your emphasis for next year could be to control wasteful spending. Or it is to develop new lines of business to continue your company’s edge over the competition. Maybe you expect next year to be your company’s break out year. The worry you have now is to make sure you don’t slow yourself down. You need to ensure resources can scale-out quickly to match your anticipated growth.
The only way you can do either of the above scenarios well is if you know your business. Not with a siloed or shallow understanding of your business, but like a good doctor knows their patient. They ask the patient the right questions. And of equal importance, know how to interpret what they are saying by listening carefully to the patient’s story. The doctor is a subject matter expert in the well-being of people. With that experience, they understand that even though they’re getting one story from the patient’s lips, the patient’s body may be telling an entirely different story.
Go Deep
To understand that story the doctor has to dive deeper. The Doctor may call for a pre-determined test that can specifically pinpoint what is going on with the patient. Then with the patient’s information, combined with the results from the medical tests, the doctor can get a true picture of what is going on to plan out the best strategy for their health.
Imagine what would happen if you went to a doctor and told them “my stomach hurts”. Then without asking you any questions, they just handed you some medicine. Would you take it? I hope not. So why rely on a spreadsheet to determine your next move with your company? Even if that spreadsheet seems to have a ton of columns and gives you all kinds of data, it is just that, data. But what you need is intelligence infused with your business data, not just a specimen jar of numbers.
The Rx For Your Data Woes
Domo gives you deeper insight into what is going on with your business. It allows you to set up pre-determine alerts for important KPIs and allows you to tell the real story of how your business is performing. You don’t need data scientists, data engineers, or even an expensive new server, all you need is cloud-based Domo. Email me, matthew.newsom@perficient.com, and with free a 30-day trial you can inject the intelligence into your business data that you’ve been lacking.
What can you do in 30 days, here are three quick examples that may help:
- Determine if the hires you want to make in 2020 are really necessary? If you’re hiring for people who will spend a lot of hours pulling in data, creating reports, and building slide decks for status meetings, you may see how easy Domo is to use and determine all of those HR hires don’t need to be made.
- See insights into your data that may prevent a 2019 data disaster from occurring. How often has your team evaluated the calculations your spreadsheets use? How many hands have touched that since you started using it? Can you confidently say you’re reporting the correct numbers?
- You’ve lost another analyst because they were tired of building reports. You load this trial and let your remaining team try it out so they can do more analyzing vs reporting building. Most likely team morale goes up because they’re involved in the process and are invested.
To close – here is a good success story that may relate to your business.
