Extending the Value of Data Beyond the Organization

Whether by choice or necessity, all organizations are thinking more about adapting their business to a changing economic environment. A significant part of this is the need to adopt a more data-driven approach to decision-making and operations; plenty of evidence shows companies gain a competitive advantage by doing so. Research from McKinsey shows data-driven businesses are 23 times better at acquiring customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable.

Once an organization adopts company-wide analytics and data-driven operations, they reach a significant milestone. However, what happens when you need to interface with customers, suppliers, and partners who are not as agile and integrated with their own data? Examples of this include: media companies and agencies that have large numbers of advertisers to report campaign results to; manufacturers with IOT device data may wish to report back device performance and maintenance requirements to their customers; and retailers that need to keep large networks of suppliers up to date on demand trends and inventory levels.

How can you help them operate at your required speed rather than slowing you back down to a crawl? Businesses can find the answer in two data-driven approaches to working beyond the four walls of the enterprise: traditional Embedded Analytics and the newer concept of Extended Analytics.

Start by exposing data to customers and partners through Embedded Analytics

When your organization is working from a shared point of view through integrated data and analytics, you can move quickly and bring internal stakeholders along with you. There’s a disconnect however, as soon as you want to take that data and insight out to external stakeholders: customers, partners, suppliers—anyone you need to collaborate with or keep informed.

Historically, the two options to solve this challenge were either manual, time-intensive, and difficult. The manual option was to fall back to “dark data” like spreadsheets, emails and presentations which are instantly disconnected from the real-time data that powered the initial decision. These documents may be further modified, analyzed, and edited before being shared back to the organization which requires more work to compare the offline version to the original, connected source.

The second difficult option was to create a bespoke analytics system for sharing data with external parties, using carefully curated data exported from internal systems. This time-consuming process is typically a distraction from the core features of the business or systems and can become a resource drag on the organization.

Embedded Analytics, available from Domo with our Embed product, solves this problem by allowing you to embed data views and analytics, so customers or partners have the information you need them to see, in real-time, directly from the source. These views can be embedded in private customer-facing views, personalized to the customer or entity, or even displayed publicly on your website. The ability to white-label your data and allow partners to perform their own analytics on the data is more straightforward for you and more empowering for your partner.

The use of Embedded Analytics helps you to share information outwards, but it’s a one-way street. It exploits existing value but doesn’t directly create any new opportunities. Customers or partners may be able to understand your data, but what if they were able to share data and insights back to you, in a structured way, so they were able to improve your data and decision-making too? Extended Analytics makes this possible.

Extended Analytics creates new value via data from customers and partners

The major shift in mindset for Extended Analytics is that customers and partners no longer need to be read-only recipients of data. Through granular permissions and structured inputs, your external stakeholders become “constituents” (i.e., active participants) in how insights are derived and utilized from data shared outside your organization.

For example, your business could share supply chain availability with customers via a white-labeled application so that they can plan future orders. Typically, your main insight into customer demand would be to look at orders placed; however, that is naturally a trailing indicator and dependent on what was available to sell. What if your customers could also supply their own demand forecasts in advance of confirmed orders within the same system, providing the relevant teams with new insights to prioritize products in current high demand?

It’s likely that this kind of flow already has a “dark-data” equivalent, which depends on offline files and manually sourcing and compiling data. Extended Analytics removes manual overhead and integrates data directly into the system where and when you need it, with greater security, governance, and fewer opportunities for errors.

With Domo Publish, our Extended Analytics system, you can move beyond sharing simple visualizations to provide full-featured, hosted analytics environments to customers and partners. Publish allows you to create tailored data experiences and provide data subscribers with the ability to create, edit, and refine reports by changing dimensions, creating calculations, customizing filters, and even uploading and combining their own data for deeper levels of insight. With Domo Publish, all external reporting and updating of data and insights can be automated across any number of customers and partners—giving you more control, security, and scalability for data shared outside your organization.