As we’re creeping up on longer nights and Halloween this weekend, some of us may be looking for a flashlight soon.  Maybe we have one and it’s in a drawer with dead batteries, maybe someone borrowed it and didn’t put it back last time, maybe it’s time to stop wasting time with the junk flashlight of years gone by and get a new one.  However you go about it, you are looking for that flashlight because you want to be able to see where you’re going and what you’re doing in the dark.

Don’t get stuck in the dark

In business, your Business Intelligence solution is like a flashlight.  They all shine a light on ‘some’ data.  In the right hands, it may keep you on the right path.  But like flashlights, not all BI solutions are created equally.

Who owns and manages your BI solution?  Instead of being hidden in a junk drawer in your kitchen like your flashlight, is it stuck in IT or some other department?  Do you have to wait or ask for additional insights into your data?

Like a basic flashlight whose light only is bright enough to light the way for a few feet in front of the user, is your BI solution only delivering value to a few people in and around your organization?

Let your light shine bright!

Not only should the right BI solutions shine a light on your important KPIs, but it should also be used to share insights throughout your organization and any clients you want to share those insights with.

I’ve put together a little video here to demonstrate the differences here between what can be seen with just a flashlight…and the right flashlight.

Partners for success

If you and your customers aren’t getting the insights you expect to see or want to see from your data, reach out and let us know.  We have amazing local and global delivery teams that can help you deliver powerful insights with Domo.

With the world in chaos, you need to do what you can to navigate the rough economic seas.

You may have 0 servers, 0 BI staff, 0 dedicated resources available to spin up a BI solution.  Worst of all you have a $0 budget.  So what can you do in 45 days to help your company gain valuable insights quickly from your data?

The short answer, LOTS!

Let’s break it down in smaller bites so it is easier to plan.  Keep in mind this is theoretical and probably more on the conservative side:

Let’s Move!

Today (Day 1) – You fill out this quick form to let me get you an extra 15 days on Domo’s 30-day free trial.  Fill out what you can, don’t worry if not 100%.

Day 1 or 2 – You have a fully-featured Domo instance spun up for you and your company at 0 cost and 0 commitments to buy.

Day 2 – I or someone at Perficient will reach out to discuss your immediate needs.  We’ll set up a time (up to 60 minutes) with someone to walk you through any issues and questions you may have, so you can get the most out of your free trial.

Day 3-5 – At this point, you’ve already pulled in some spreadsheets.  You may have connected to some cloud sources like Salesforce or Netsuite, and Google Sheets.  Now you’ve found the benefits of automating and scheduling some of those imports.

Vital Data is Ready to Go

Day 8 – With Perficient helping you along the way you’ve put together a dashboard with Netsuite, Salesforce, and some forecasting spreadsheets and they’re ready to share with your team.

Day 10 – Your Marketing department gets wind of Domo and has asked to get set up too.  They hop in and connect various marketing sources so they can see how they’re doing with their limited marketing budget.

Your Stock is Rising

Day 12 – You’ve been invited to the company leadership meeting to discuss your dashboard and the findings you’ve made. Leadership appreciates your hard work because they spot some places where company funds may be better spent to keep the business operating smoothly.

Days 15 – 30 – More people, departments, and data are in Domo. Some departments cut their budgets so they have less time to work on building reports.  The fact that Domo automates those wasted report building steps is crucial at this time.  You also set up alerts so the data gets to the people that need to make decisions ASAP.

Now You’re Just Showing Off

Days 31 – 45 – You’ve now gotten so good at Domo you’re ready to start sharing this data out to clients and vendors.  You can do this by sending some data out on a schedule to email out to vendors.  Your most important client actually is logging in to see a dashboard you built.

Keep in mind this is you as a part-time resource working on Domo and with some help from Perficient.  The more time you can put into it from your side and maybe some budget for Perficient time can rapidly accelerate the advances you make during your free trial to find insights to help your business during this critical time.

If you’ve filled out the survey above I or someone on my team will reach out to you. But if you haven’t and just want to chat because maybe you already have Domo or have something else, reach out to me at Matthew.Newsom@perficient.com and I’ll be happy to chat.

Matt

Modern and mobile in your personal life

I have a mobile banking app on my phone like a lot of people do.  That gives me the option to check out the most current activity of all my bank accounts wherever I am.  It’s not a necessity to have a mobile app or even bank online, but it makes things a lot easier and gives me answers quickly.  Before banking went mobile, finding the status of a pending transaction was a bit difficult. You could find the answer by waiting on the monthly paper statement, logging into a computer, or heading up to an ATM or speaking with a teller.

Antiquated and slow in your professional life

Now, take that same situation and apply it to your company or your department.  How difficult is it for you to know what’s going on?  No, I don’t mean Bob’s version of what’s going on, but what is REALLY going on.  (Bob will be our generic co-worker for this bit, nothing against Bobs just go with it).  Are your inventory numbers lower than you’re comfortable with?  What may be ok for Bob, may not be ok for you…and then you don’t know there is a problem until it is too late.  Does your team spend too much focus on projects that aren’t profitable?  If they did, would you be able to tell?

What’s going on?

Is your difficulty in answering “What’s going on?” consist of emailing a team member and waiting a few hours?  Do you have your own reports with spreadsheets full of pivot tables and crazy macros that run to answer that question?  Do you have a dedicated person that will email a report to you weekly with their own commentary about the direction things are going?

Those options all work, but is that the best you can do?  What if you automate those routine manual processes?  What if you or your team could build a mobile-ready dashboard, easily?  You’d have your important KPIs anywhere you go any time you need them.

Stop kicking that can

Domo is one of the best solutions for you to be thinking about so that you can know what’s going on across your organization or department.  I like to think of it as a blank slate solution for companies with awesome ideas.  But in too many places, those awesome ideas get treated like the can getting kicked down the road.  They never get enacted because of reasons like a lack of the right personnel skill sets or IT roadblocks.

Let me put your mind at ease.  Domo is a great tool and it has a lot of great resources to help you get on your feet.  Plus you have my team and I here at Perficient that will show you how to catch the fish and then teach you to fish.  For the IT roadblocks, that is usually a reason people come to Domo.  Non-IT folks feel IT takes too long to build up a server or make changes to existing technology.  It isn’t because they’re just sloths, it is because they are usually understaffed and overburdened.  Reach out to us and we’ll help you work with IT to ensure everyone is on board and we’ll let IT know you’re doing them a favor.

We’re Here to help

If you haven’t taken a look at Domo yet, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help guide you to a free trial and how best to use it (what to think about, what to test, etc) with what you’re looking for and are running into at your office.

If you’re on Domo and want to get more out of it we can help.

Stepping Up To The Plate

To me, one of the most exciting and most frustrating things to do is to find a new solution for a need at your employer.  Your job is to make a decision with the best information available to you.  Then implement that decision successfully.

If everything works out smoothly, you get a few high fives and move to your next project with no fuss.  But if the information you got was wrong.  And you make a bad decision because of it.  The implementation is going to be bad and everyone will remember it.  Not only that, they’ll remember your connection to that disaster and make it a lot tougher for you when you need to change something next time.

Trusted Advisor

When a client comes to us for a solution, I appreciate the fact that at Perficient we’re vendor-agnostic in our approach.  We don’t force a client down a path that would not work for them.  We help guide them to the best solution because we know it is our reputation on the line.  So if you’re looking for the best solution, partnering with a company that has experience in this field is priceless.

You’ve Picked Your Horse

But say you know what you want and you reach out to a vendor directly.  For me, I specialize in Domo so we’ll talk to companies that have already decided on Domo as their future Business Intelligence solution.  But they are not Domo experts but need to turn around a quick ROI.  They may look on Domo’s site for partners or they do their own research and they find us, Perficient.

Why Perficient?

One of the first concerns people have about Perficient with Domo goes something like this “Perficient is a very large company and we’re just an SMB, will we fall through the cracks at Perficient?”  To put your mind at ease, we work with companies of all sizes.  We have local offices in 22 cities across the county as well as a team that works nationally to help ensure client success in various verticals and technologies.   Each client has multiple people that are looking over the account so there are many “fail-safes” in place to prevent anyone from ever being overlooked.

Another question we get is “we see that Domo is an emerging partner with Perficient, what does that mean?”  The partnership type depends on multiple factors, but each partnership is important to Perficient.  The details of why a partner goes where is out of my scope, but I know that Perficient takes each partnership very seriously.  Keep in mind, our reputation is on the line.  So we strive to ensure that we’re focused on delivering exceptional results to all of our clients regardless of the partnership.

That same person may wonder how much talent Perficient brings to the table with an “emerging partnership”.  We have a team of BI experts in various technologies with many years of experience. Answering the important business questions and then putting those answers technically into place is second nature to us.  I personally have been working with Domo since 2015 and have implemented the solution various times as a partner and starting up a BI department for a company as an employee.  And now I’m helping clients achieve very quick ROI on Domo through Perficient.

What are some ways our experts can help you with Domo?

1. Implementation – We can help ensure that you focus on the best strategy for quick wins to get you familiar with Domo and start gaining traction in your company for great buy-in from employees.
2. Performance – Domo has some amazing capabilities, but if you did a DIY job on your implementation to save a few bucks, you may be missing out on all the performance enhancements available to you.
   1. One of the most common things we see here is that your Major Domo was big on SQL and wrote all the transforms in SQL. Due to the fact they were busy doing 1000 other things, those transforms are starting to slow down.  Something we would do here is, of course, ensure the syntax is structured as efficiently as possible, then look at creating some possible indexes, and if those don’t look good a re-write in Magic ETL may be the next course of action. (Magic ETL is Domo’s ETL tool).
3. Strategy – Regardless of where you are on your Domo roadmap, Perficient has a team of experts that can guide you to strategically align your BI strategy with your business.  Maybe you’d like to monetize your data visualizations, maybe you need to present more impactful visualizations for your team, regardless of your need, we can help.

Keep in mind we’re not limited to just those areas.  If you need help setting up SSO, making difficult connections to data, or need help with very complex ETL work….we’re here.

Hot Seat?

So, if you’re sitting on the hot seat to find a new BI solution for your company, or you want to make sure you are getting everything out of your current Domo instance, reach out to me and let me know.

What killed the cat?

When I was growing up I’d occasionally hear the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” when I’d ask too many questions.  I haven’t heard that phrase in a long time, and I’m pretty sure chasing that mouse into the street is what killed the cat.  But isn’t it strange that there is actually a phrase to demotivate someone from being curious?

I personally don’t think people are nearly curious and inquisitive enough.  Going into a new job, promoted to a new role, or transitioning careers you expect people to be a bit more inquisitive.  “What do I do for this?”, “Who do I call about that” and that makes total sense.  But why aren’t we expecting people that have been in roles for a lot longer to ask the more difficult question of “why?”

Morale Killers are Among Us

If you’re in the C-Suite or in a Director role, do you know how many inefficient processes your teams are still using?  Do they exist because your teams lack the empowerment or curiosity to ask “why?” In my experience, I’ve talked to a lot of people about their data.  One of the questions I make sure to ask is “why are you doing it this way?”  Most of the time the answer is not so good.  I often hear something like “the person who trained me did it that way” or “I don’t know. I don’t have time to think about that.”

So if people are willing to sacrifice time each month instead of asking the right “why” questions, should we expect people to dig deeper if it cost them more effort to do it?  Especially if their job does not encourage to find and correct inefficiencies?

Ask Why and Thrive

I believe that there is no position in a company where that question can’t be asked.  Encouraging people to ask “why” and dig into the status quo of how you’re handling data, how you’re processing inventory, or how you’re cleaning the floors.  If you can find a better way to do it by asking “why”, why not ask it?

Imagine at that point you’ve set free your entire organization to find wasteful processes, wasteful technologies, and wasteful thinking without any additional costs. You’d probably also see a morale boost because you’ve empowered your teams and you’ve given them the ability to improve the morale-killing work they may have been doing.

Sounds good right?

On October 29, Perficient and Domo are teaming up to bring Ben Schein, former BI Lead at Target and current VP of Data Curiosity at Domo, to Minneapolis for a user event.  Schein will discuss how data is for everyone and explore how we can move beyond hiring a few data scientists or enabling the elite 1% of your organization to work with data, and getting the data to the 99% in order for them to make better business decisions. This event will be a great opportunity for you to learn how your organization can unlock data insights feed curiosity with Domo.

You can register for this Domo event here. Space is limited, so sign up soon. And if you can’t make it,  we’d still love to hear from you. Reach out to me and I’ll introduce you to some great people to help get you rolling.

Event Details:
October 29, 2019 | 3:00pm – 5:30pm Central
Capital Grille | 801 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN 55402
Register Now

Let’s Go Car Shopping!

When you go car shopping what is it that you’re looking for?  Maybe a kid-hauler or maybe it’s a fun sports car now that they’re out of the house….but either way you have something in mind and a price range you’re trying to work in.  So what is it that you’re really buying?  A car!?  But is that really it?  Not quite.

Let’s say it’s your first car.  With that car comes the purchase of a driver’s license, maybe some training costs to get it, new car insurance, and the acceptance of future purchases for gas and maintenance to use it.  It may also come with additional subscription services for radio and internet connectivity to improve your experience while you own it.  So although you wanted to just buy a car, you may end up purchasing a lot more, even if you are paying for them later.

Technology shopping is very similar.  You may have executives and other stakeholders telling you that the company needs a new BI Solution, or as they may say “we need better reporting”, and a lot of the times depending on what your company is already using you may have a tendency to favor one solution over another.

Decisions, Decisions

For example, you’re an IT Director for a company that is very familiar and ingrained in Microsoft technology.  You have some SQL Servers but your company each year is getting into more SaaS solutions each year (SalesForce, Adobe, Jira, etc).  Your team now finds it difficult to see your company’s progress in one place.  So a natural inclination for you may be to reach out to Power BI.  A good solution, and you won’t get fired for making it, but what’s your overhead going to look like for making that decision, and will those stakeholders really ever know or care?

For you to successfully implement your Power BI solution you may also need to make sure you purchase and build an Azure SQL DW.  Not a big deal if you have the budget and some folks that can ensure proper configuration, make the connections to all those cloud resources, and management of solution for security and availability purposes.

Don’t forget, now that you’ll be trying to get a lot of data into this DW you’re also going to need an ETL layer.  So that is another possible solution you’re going to need to budget for and configure.  Again, not a huge deal, but you’re now talking maybe a few FTEs that you’re expanding your team with.  So with the Azure DW, an ETL tool, and Power BI to visualize your data you may be looking at being able to produce repeatable wins in about a year.

Squeaky Wheels

From my experience, if people are barking about changes to reporting, they have a pain point that is bothering them today.  So telling them that they’ll have a solution in a year may get you removed from their Christmas card list.  Even if you go this route, there is a strong chance they will find a way to get it done without your help using a solution they found and you may not be able to support.

So what about Tableau?  I mean every company under the sun seems to dabble with Tableau to some extent right?  It must be super awesome and easy to use.  But what about scalability?  What about complex ETL work?  Will you rely on just Tableau to make that happen?  Probably not.  Again, you’ll need a solid DW and an ETL solution before Tableau does its magic.  With this route, you are probably looking at that full solution going online to start winning in about six months.

Tableau and Power BI are great tools.  Their downside is that they may come with the need for other solutions to ensure you get what you need.

Born in the Cloud, for the Cloud

Now let’s look at Domo.  Thinking back to our car shopping analogy, they are what I would call the Everything Car.   One person may look at Domo as a nice viz tool, another person may look at it as a great DW and ETL solution, while another person may look and be amazed that it connects to 1k other solutions that you already use.   For your BI solution, Domo is the one-stop-shop for you.  No need to worry about a storage solution, no need to worry about finding an ETL solution, everything you need is on board.  Another thing about this is the quick time to value.  You could have data wins coming out of Domo in a matter of weeks.  Which would be music to the ears of anyone currently struggling with data/reporting needs.

Power BI and Tableau are great enterprise solutions.  But don’t overlook the fact that sometimes you can take the low code approach to something complex and have the results be spectacular.  Depending on your workforce, the size and skillsets of your Data Engineering Team, the technical ecosystem your company is in, and how quickly you want to see value in your investment, are all important considerations to take into account when determining the best BI solution.

Take a look here at the Fall 2019 BI Platform report from G2.

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.

Stuck In Rush Hour

A few days ago I was driving home from Atlanta during rush hour and my phone died.  All I could see in front of me were brake lights and red lights.  Not a huge deal, I knew where I wanted to go and I knew how to get there.  But since I didn’t have GPS traffic statistics I had no idea how long I’d be stuck in traffic.  I did, however, have the traffic reports on the radio every 15 minutes, but by the time I get those, it is usually too late to help me.

Another thing I couldn’t do was let folks know when I would arrive or even where I was.  Again, not a huge deal and for most of us, that is how it was a few years back.  But technology has changed and a lot of us like to take advantage of it so we don’t have to waste time when it can be avoided or mitigated (like sitting in traffic).

So where am I going?

Reporting in a lot of companies is similar to the non-GPS drive home days.  How so?

Are the “reports” you’re getting like the radio’s traffic updates?  A brief snapshot of the recent past, but a bit stale?  Could you add more value to that data if you could compare it to the now and see how you are trending?

How about my predicament about my location?  If I had an appointment that I was running late for or some dinner I needed to get to, I’d have no idea if I would make it nor would I be able to let people know that I’m running late.

Is your company data like an isolated driver in traffic?

Do you only know you’ve been having a sales decline when a report arrives to tell you about it?  Or do you know as soon as numbers start trending below your goals?   If the numbers are trending down, does your current reporting or BI system know who to contact to correct those values?  Does the system include instructions on how to make those corrections in case your Top Closer is vacationing in Fiji and unreachable?

What I’m trying to get as is that the technology to do this is available now.  If you’re handling your company’s most critical data like you would take a long drive without GPS on your phone, you’re going to run into some unexpected traffic jams.  Leverage the technology that is available to you now so you can use your resources efficiently, effectively, and securely.  Now is not the time to sit around waiting for your people to get the data you needed yesterday, it is time for data to come to you that you need now.

You have the data, we’ll help you to reach your desintation

We have partnered with great companies so that we can implement the right solution to fit your specific use case.  If you know your Perficient rep, reach out to them to start this conversation.  If not, reach out to me and I’ll help you connect.  And you won’t need to worry about your data getting stuck behind that stalled car in the left lane on the interstate.

The Resilience of your Intelligence

Regardless of what department or area you work in it is critical that your company is set up to handle storms and disasters that may come.  I’ve been following Hurricane Dorian, like many of you probably have been, and along with praying and hoping for the people in its path, I have been thinking a good deal about business resilience.  Although your company may not be near a coast, you still have factors like flooding, fires, and tornadoes that could impact you no matter where you are.  Or keep in mind, that if your business is near a future crime scene the building may get cut off until law enforcement is finished with their work.  No matter where you are, the best thing you can do for your business is to mitigate the impact that could occur to the most probable issues around you and to the vendors you use.

If you’re out of the path of any current issues, then now is a great time to be thinking about the resilience of your company’s data.  Most people think of backups as the way to go and if those are done then great you’re all set.  But having a resilient business intelligence footing is more than just a backup strategy.

Here are three areas to think about to get you started becoming more resilient:

1. Is our data stored in a place that has redundant servers and will be staying online throughout the current issue (ex. Cloud)?
2. If your offices go offline is data still being processed and can our teams still see results with their mobile device? Just because you may not have an office, or power to that office, life around you still goes on.  You need to make sure data is still flowing and people can still get to it if needed.  Having your BI accessible from a mobile device that can hit a cell network if your local network is down is critical.
3. Do we have any vendors that may experience issues during a storm or localized disaster that could impact our BI? Remember your data may rely on third-party vendors to process and deliver that data to you.  If their sites and people are unavailable, will you be impacted?  Can your BI system ingest backdated information once they are back online?  Do they have a secondary location where they may send data from that may be outside of the norm…and if so can your system ingest that data with little trouble?
4. People – your people are your greatest resources and if they have to take cover offsite and aren’t around to do some manual data processing, who is going to do it? Why are they having to do manual data processing anyway?  Now is the time to think about automating this work so they can do more analytical work for you instead of just processing data.

Better to Plan Too Early Than One Day Too Late

There are a lot more questions to ask to really make sure your BI configuration can take be resilient through a disaster.  As you know I’m a big Domo fan and handling the above issues through Domo is very easy to do.  From reconfiguring a data import…and then back again…to accessing data reports on a mobile device…to automating your data ETL work, Domo makes it easy.

I hope this blog gave you something to think about and if you have some insight you would like to share with our readers, please include them below.  If you would like to know more about Domo, feel free to reach out to me or your Perficient contact.  Thank you.

Have you ever said something like “I wish I could go back when…” maybe it was to re-live an awesome vacation or some funny event.  But, if you work with data you’ve probably said that same thing, but not for nearly as pleasant circumstances.  Maybe you’ve said it because the data you’ve been importing since last week has been full of errors.  Well, good news for you!  With Domo you can go back to a point in time when your data was error-free.  You can also do it without involving IT, without going to the basement to pull out backup tapes (if you use backup tapes, we need to talk), and do it all in seconds.

I’m going to show you how Domo makes it very easy to go back to a point in time with your data with a few screen grabs.

But before we start, there a few things you need to keep in mind:

• You must have the right to be able to edit a dataset before you get the option to revert. If you don’t see the option for “Revert to this point” under action when your mouse hovers over it, you may not have enough permissions.
• If you are using the Replace method for a dataset, rolling back data may not be what you want to do. Discuss this problem with your consultant to see if this is the right way to fix your current problem and if there is a better way to prevent this from occurring next time.
• This works for Datasets that were created by Domo Connectors. It does not work for Datasets created as a result of an ETL/Dataflow process.  There are ways to roll those back too, reach out to me directly or stay tuned to my blog and I’ll go over that in future posts.

The first step to restoring data, click Data:

Next, click on the Datasets Icon:

Next, search for your dataset (once found, click on the Dataset to open it):

Next, open the History page:

On the History page, you’ll see all the historical runs of your dataset.  If you have it scheduled to run every 15 minutes, you should see it has run every 15 minutes.  If once a day, you’ll only see it having run one time per day.  Find the point in time you would like to go back to and hover your mouse over the far right under Action and some options pop up.

Next, click on “Revert to this point” if you would like to back up your dataset to be like it was at that particular point.

Next, you will get a confirmation page that lets you know what will occur if you reverted to this point.

I hope this can help you.  There are a lot of considerations you need to make when you start importing and storing data.  So reach out to us at Perficient so we can help you manage your data handling strategy correctly.

I hate looking for clothes to wear, especially if I’m in a hurry.  Sometimes life gets crazy and my favorite shirt may still be in the dryer, or I can’t find the match to a sock I already have in my hand.   Something easy can turn into a chore very quickly when things aren’t organized.

That is how I feel a lot of the time when it comes to data.  How many times have you asked a data-related question that there is no answer to?  Maybe your data is all over the place, maybe the data isn’t coming in often enough, or maybe the person that would have built the report isn’t available today?  This can be extremely frustrating.

I have worked in and around marketing agencies and media for over a decade and this is a problem that I have run across a good deal.  There are lots of channels that agencies may use to reach customers but for them to get a comprehensive, single pane of glass look, it can be tough.  Want to make it tougher for them?  Mix in the marketing data (social, radio, print, mail, etc) and ask how it relates to internal sales sources, or a custom CRM, or the customer’s loyalty program activity.

To solve the above problem, it seems like companies have people trying to find the match to that missing sock every day.  But that doesn’t have to be the case, Domo provides an easy to use and quick-to-implement solution that allows you to get actionable data instead of just acting to get the data.  Imagine instead of having someone compile reports daily, your data just updates in your visualizations throughout the day?  Imagine not having to go out to find the anomalies in your data, but when those anomalies occur, they come to you via text or email?  With Domo, you can do that.

Maybe you are not getting new data quickly enough, maybe you are sending out reports with stale data (by the way, if your reports aren’t live, the data is already stale).  Or what happens a lot of time, your company has grown, your data footprint has grown, but your analytics solution isn’t keeping up and reports take forever to pull up instead of sub-second like they should have when you started.

Make Domo Your +1

Don’t worry if you have 1k other systems in place and don’t want to be the person that asks for the 1,001^st.  Think of Domo as the tool that is going to make the other 1k run more effectively because you’ll have insight into the performance of those in easy to understand dashboards.  Domo is a solution that will make data around it better, so feel free to keep your other solutions.   Let Domo give you the answers to the data questions you’ve always wanted to know.

If you’re involved in Business Intelligence, Marketing, or work with Data in any capacity in your organization, and want to know more about Domo, please reach out to us.  And please feel free to comment on this blog or email me directly (matthew.newsom@perficient.com) if you have any questions or comments.

What is the Truth?

As a decision-maker, how do you handle the data you are given throughout the day?  You may get it in spreadsheets from multiple people in the company, sent at multiple times, telling you different stories.  You may, like a lot of people, just take the data as it comes and then act on it from there.  Because let’s be honest, to verify every report for accuracy as it comes in would be painful and inefficient.

But what do you do when Bob in Accounting sends you a financial report that directly conflicts with one you just received from another person in the company?  What if this happens a lot, across many different departments, what do you believe?

It’s Not You, It’s Everyone

I’ve worked with data for many years and this is a problem that a lot of companies have.  Sometimes it also comes in the form of someone getting comfortable with data that “looks right”.  Then an inquisitive employee comes in later and digs into the details.  Then to everyone’s dismay, they discover previously reported data that has been used for years has basically been wrong.  Not because of any nefarious reasons, but QA sometimes is the first thing to go when people are in a hurry to deliver.

Domo knows this stuff happens. To help their users out they created an enhanced governance process to certify what data and cards (visualizations) have been approved.  So you can relax knowing your critical data has already been thoroughly reviewed by the proper people in your company.

Get Certified

To do this, you set up a process to how a card or dataset gets certified (ex. goes through Anne, then to Carrie, then to your CFO).  There are Department Level Certifications and Company Level Certification that you can create depending on your needs and size of your company.  This is important and helpful because once your data and cards have been certified they get a symbol to show what level of certification it has.  This doesn’t prevent or slow down the data import process or card building process, people can still create un-certified content at will.  But when something needs to be presented to a client or covers some critical piece of business that may get shared around, that content can get vetted out for quality.

So going back to the mismatch report issue from earlier.  You notice that the report from Bob shows it has been Company certified.  While the other report has no certification.  So as a decision-maker you can be confident that using Bob’s data is the truth to run with.  And for the issue with data looking right vs being right, if the content has been through multiple SMEs at your company and has been certified, the likelihood of using bad data has now been greatly reduced.

Don’t Get Derailed by Success

Success in Domo brings new challenges.  People get very excited at how easy it is to bring in new datasets and create cards, but a few months later you’ll find yourself with junk that may not be worth using.  So before you have to restate numbers to a client, reach out to Perficient and we’ll walk you through getting your content back in a place where it is accurate, scalable, and aligns with your business.

Worried about user adoption, there’s a Domo app for that. Click here to learn more.