Have more time for fun #DOMO

A few years ago I worked for a big company that used massive spreadsheets to measure everything in the business. Email after email, version after version, and report after report would arrive at my desk, but I didn't understand or fully trust anything. Trying to wrap my head around all these “reports” became a massive time suck. Needless to say, reporting was a nightmare.

I tried hiring analysts to help me decode the information I was receiving but I still couldn't understand the data and no one could understand why. They thought I was strange. I wanted to see charts and graphs and I wanted them to be displayed in big, real-time dashboards. I wanted everything in the cloud and I didn’t want to see one more email attachment for as long as I lived.

Today I am fortunate to be the CEO of an innovative, global company from Australia. At m-View we focus on our core business which is software development and professional services. We try to limit our investments in administration and overheads. We don’t want to hire admin staff or analysts — we want to invest in developers and user experience people. With the recent launch of our wearable cameras and the growth and transformation of our company, I was struggling to get a view of where we are at with a range of metrics and data. I wanted us to be more data driven. I wanted us to make decisions based on data and be able to react faster and make more informed data-driven investments.

As many of you would know I am addicted to running, health and well-being. Years ago I started heart rate training, and having a plan and continually monitoring the data I can adjust and measure my performance in training and in racing. I can easily from my PC or phone look at all my results, my performance and my plan in real time in graphs charts and even old fashioned tables if I want to. There’s a sense of being in a state of flow when I can access my workout metrics and health information. Here is an example of my running data that helps me track and perform.

As CEO, not having that same access to my business data just doesn’t cut it. In short, I needed to find a solution that helped me track the health of my business. I looked at several products and tools that provided tables and dashboards but I was not impressed. One morning as I was checking my LinkedIn feed, I saw an ad for a thing called Domo. The ad said Domo could visualize my business data. I decided to try my luck and after a few calls and an event in Australia where I saw a more comprehensive product demo, I was sold. I signed up for Domo as fast as I could.

The Domo professional services team sat with me and scoped out the project implementation based on our business priorities. Together we then agreed on the roll out plan. Things have gone very well and the team is fully engaged from halfway across the world to ensure that our rollout is a success.

I am now realizing my vision of deploying a real-time digital dashboard. Something I didn’t think was possible for a very long time.  Here are a couple of amazing things we can now do after only two weeks with Domo:

Understand our salesforce.com (SFDC) data: We have a range of visualizations that bring in our SFDC data, so we can quickly understand our pipeline and revenue, neglected opportunities, and deals by rep by stage. I’m also amazed at how easy it is to develop different views on my own. No more trying to create charts for board presentations. It all just happens out of the box. Here’s one specific example: Last week I was working on the FY16 plan but I needed to look at the cost of goods sold (COGS) for our pipeline. The team at Domo showed me how and in less than 15 minutes of my call we had a chart and table that reflected the COGS by quarter, overlaid on our pipeline. Our CFO didn’t have to do anything. It was astounding. I can now manipulate the data so quickly I can give the exact view I want, whenever I want. Better still, my team can do the same thing. They don’t need to ask anyone for help and our data is always up to date and accurate. We are now a data-driven organization, (not spreadsheet driven) and that is a great way to be.

Get instant insights from our Amazon Web Services (AWS) data:  Before Domo, one of our infrastructure teams had to go in to our AWS account every week and produce reports on our server capacity and customers. What a waste of his time! Now all our AWS feeds are displayed on our dashboard through Domo. Similar to our experience connecting to SFDC, we can set alerts to be informed when/if something changes based on rules we set.

These are just two of the many ways we have been blown away in our short time using Domo. As we move forward we intend to learn more, be more productive and bring in more feeds and more capabilities.

The entire company is excited about our deployment of the Domo platform and we can’t wait to deploy more across our company. Even our CFO is excited about the way we can spin financial reports and save the whole department lots of time.

 We are Domo’d and we love it. More time for running getting ready for #TCSNYMarathon 2015 and 2016 yes doing both #DOMO