Domo has been busy spreading the word about how we’re revolutionising business. In addition to Domopalooza 2017, held March 21st -24th, Domo was at two different events in London within a two-week period.
At Retail Week Live and Gartner Data & Analytics Conference 2017, both of which were held in the same building near the O2 Arena in London, we spoke with attendees about how Domo can solve their business problems. It was an exciting two weeks to be sure.
Retail Week Live
At Retail Week, we spoke with retail directors, supply chain managers, merchandisers, ecommerce practitioners, and leadership teams about their common frustrations of operating their businesses blind—a problem that many businesses face, leaving them with no compass for making decisions.
In fact, with the huge volume of data available today, we found that very little of it is informing the daily decisions of many of the retailers we met, who then have to rely on experience and instinct to make decisions. The reports they do receive are static, delayed, and don’t help solve the problem in front of them right now.
For executive teams, it doesn’t help them scrutinise the right part of the business to push performance. For front line teams, it’s often ignored in favour of preferred use of their own data from their own technology – which is isolated from the central BI architecture.
How does Domo help? Real-time data informing what matters to retailers right now, alerts to laser-focus on what needs immediate attention, collaboration alongside insights, and the Domo app store with apps designed specifically for retailers, all help retailers optimise across the entire organisation.
These solutions had lots of people chattering about the common use cases of our existing clients who solved their data problems with Domo. The huge array of apps available resonated strongly with the retail audience and got even more people talking about Domo.
Gartner Data & Analytics Conference 2017 in London
With an expo half full of very similar visualisation tools, and every monitor in the room displaying beautiful dashboards, Domo stuck out from the competition. The conversations that resonated with attendees—both at the stand, our sponsored lunch, and at our speaking session—were about embracing the wider data story across the enterprise.
Traditional BI focuses on the central data warehouse, which includes their primary business data. The typical requirements from vendors is to turn the data into stories so business users can understand what’s going on. When presented a brief with this situation happening, we throw the baby out with the bathwater and encouraged BI experts to take a different approach in engaging with their business users.
It goes like this: Ignore (for now) the data in front of them, and instead look at the following about business users:
- What is each user trying to achieve?
- What are the contributing factors (both internal and external) that impact their ability to be successful at these defined goals?
- What are the common business questions they need answers to every day?
Armed with this, BI experts can curate a BI view to actively support each line of business and help them answer questions and make better decisions.
The conversation typically went further to address the huge array of ‘shadow BI’ that exists throughout organisations, why this isn’t a bad thing (it’s where innovation often happens), and how to embrace this activity with a genuine end-to- end self-service BI strategy with Domo.
Though the conversations at each event seem very different from each other, to get the full value of the Domo platform, users need to engage from both ends of the data conversation and address the common issues that face an entire organisation.
Learn more about how Domo helps retail organisations and BI experts optimise with real-time data, or check Domo out for yourself in our live demo series, the Daily Dose.