In a recent blog post, we discussed how to draft a data-driven dream team. One of the project team members discussed was the Champion, a role that Domo and many of our clients refer to as a “MajorDomo.” In this post, we describe what a MajorDomo is, and explain why having one is paramount to the success of your business management platform.
A MajorDomo is a business and data-savvy leader who takes your company to that next level. At Domo, we have created a Center of Excellence, or a dedicated team of MajorDomos, whose sole responsibility includes governing and evangelizing how to leverage the power of Domo’s business management platform within our company. They develop skills that are unique to Domo’s platform and functionality and then disseminate that knowledge across the organization.
Regardless of the size of your organization, creating an effective data governance model is crucial to answering your critical business questions. There are three major benefits our clients are seeing by identifying a MajorDomo and developing a Center of Excellence.
1) Harvesting more from your data garden.
According to a recent Forbes Insights (LINK TO THE SURVEY) survey, the most analytics-driven enterprises report that their businesses “have implemented an enterprise-wide data architecture.” Despite this investment, a recent Domo survey of 1,000+ business leaders found that 57% can’t access the information they need, 68% struggle to make sense of the information, and 80% feel the information doesn’t answer their business questions.
Just like a fruitful garden requires attention whether it’s pruning the plants or pulling out weeds, your “data garden” needs ongoing maintenance in order to harvest the insights your company is looking for. The MajorDomo works closely with the senior leaders, business analysts, and data specialists to help ensure accurate, clean, fresh, and secure data.
As an example of this, Domo has deployed an internal checklist to audit Domo visualizations or metrics (which we refer to as cards) to ensure a question is being answered and an action can be taken on the data. For instance, the checklist includes whether or not the visualization allows the ability to drill down to additional data, has a refresh schedule, and has a supporting description so other business users can understand its meaning.
Taking data accuracy a step further, the MajorDomo can help users determine the quality of a dataset by how many questions that data can answer. For example, if a user builds a dataset that only answers one or two questions, and the user later needs to build another dataset to answer related questions, then the user’s data architecture in the first dataset was inefficient. Thinking about data with a more business-minded context can help create more meaningful datasets. And creating more meaningful datasets can lead to an iterative analytical culture.
2) Accelerating change management.
Getting users to embrace a new platform can be challenging. Just like fertilizer provides nutrients to speed the growth of plants, a MajorDomo helps accelerate adoption by providing hands on training and resources to help users get started in designing their own datasets. One of Domo’s own MajorDomos says his typical day involves helping users get their data into Domo, auditing metrics, helping executives create the metrics to measure the business on, and managing the overall data ecosystem.
At Domo, a MajorDomo certification program helps our MajorDomos learn skills unique to Domo’s functionality and transfer that knowledge to users across the company. Case in point? Domo’s own MajorDomo found that when Domo’s president’s picture was associated with a visualization, it increased the views of the card by 500%. This then became a best practice to drive business users to access important data.
3) Enabling scalability.
Domo is the vehicle to answering the questions you need to run your business more effectively, without the need to involve specialized analysts. But over time, the questions you need to answer will change as your business evolves and new users and departments begin using Domo. MajorDomos who are able to empower the business to get these new answers and insights without outside resources, have seen their ability to scale their value exponentially. For many of our clients, we have seen the MajorDomo role develop as their organizations gain more value from the platform and break up data silos. One client MajorDomo said that “because of Domo, I can enable all sorts of departments with information to help them be successful in their job that day.”
In sum.
Every company is unique, and regardless of whether it’s one individual (or a Center of Excellence), designating a MajorDomo makes your organization’s Domo experience that much more effective. Further, cultivating a crop of MajorDomos helps your business users answer unlimited questions to manage your business better.