Thanksgiving is largely a food holiday. At the Roden household, we always mix in shooting guns and throwing the Nerf football on the street. For the most part, it is about cramming my seemingly ever-expanding extended family into a small home and eating the traditional cornucopia of food staples synonymous with this great American holiday. For me personally, the additional selection of food items at Thanksgiving presents a problem, you see, I suffer from a phobia of having “soggy” food. Juice from corn absolutely cannot mix with mash potatoes and gravy. If the gravy dam I make in my mashed potatoes breaks and allows the gravy to violate the creamy fruit salad on my plate, the gig is up and the entire plate of food is rendered inedible. So, to combat this, I devised a complex series of rolled paper napkins to create fluid barriers between my food groups. Much thought is given as to where certain foods were placed on my plate: solids, semi solids, fluids, and gelatins – all calculated based on viscosity and mass.

What does this have to do with executive dashboards? Well, there are plenty of people like me; people who like a place for everything and everything in its place. Others may as well eat out of a pig trough, mixing foods together on purpose, stating “enhanced flavor” from the gravy when they ingest their green beans. Data is a lot like food. Some prefer to consume it in a segregated fashion, others prefer to mix it all up and see if they can’t find that combination of flavors for a new insight on taste. The key is, it all has to be on one plate. And really, at the lowest level, that is what Domo does for business executives – takes all of the data you care about, puts it all on one plate and allows you to consume it the way that makes sense to you. Want to keep your financial data separate from your web traffic? Fine. But try mixing those financial KPIs with sales KPIs and prepare to have your mind blown!

So when you sit down to the feast of the year, before you stuff your face, look at the food on your plate – you like all of it or it wouldn’t be there right? Now, when you come back to work after the holiday break, look at your inbox, full of emails with spreadsheet attachments and automated reports in PDFs. Don’t you wish they were all on one plate? Domo can do that for you. Bon appetit!