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FROM THE BUILDING A DATA-EMPOWERED BUSINESS SERIES

It’s a New Era in

Business Intelligence,
Enabled by the Cloud
The cloud has unleashed the potential of people
to combine data from thousands of sources in
ways that were unimaginable just five years ago. It’s
time to take a fresh look at BI with an eye toward
making it the energy source of a new kind of agile
and responsive organization.

In 2017, The Economist declared, “The world’s most

valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”1

The analogy is apt today because businesses can

no more function without information than the
industrial giants of a century ago could operate
without petroleum. The data is actually more
valuable than oil. Unlike oil, it can be reused,
combined in new and innovative ways and shared
across an organization or the world.

1 “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data,”

The Economist, May 6, 2017.

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Innovative data management is not only a major
source of competitive advantage in nearly every
market, but the lifeblood of web-scale companies
that are reshaping retail, transportation and
hospitality industries, among others. Legacy
technology and processes that limit the potential of
everyone in an organization to leverage the power
of data threatens the health of the entire entity.
It’s time for a new approach to leveraging business
intelligence across the entire organization,
empowering BI teams to deliver insights using
actionable real-time analytics, and for individuals
and business units to access the insights they need
simply and easily from any device at any time.
The Concept of Self-Service BI
Much has been made of the notion of self-service
BI. The idea is to combine the specialized knowledge
and insights of business users to identify the right
questions to ask with the expertise of data scientists
and engineers to find the right data sources and
prepare the necessary data sets.
To achieve this goal data quality matters, and BI
systems themselves must be maintained and
updated. Similarly, giving business users the
freedom to dispense information from their BI
tools doesn’t negate the need to ensure that the
appropriate data sources are used, data has been
cleaned and software is patched and updated.
Although too much control can be stifling, too
much flexibility can be reckless. Data scientists are
needed to help users make informed decisions.
For example, correlation and causation are easily
confused. To use a popular example, the fact that
ice cream sales and the rate of swimming deaths
It’s a New Era in Business Intelligence, Enabled by the Cloud
Data scientists are needed to create
the guardrails that prevent their
business colleagues from making
misguided decisions based on
inadequate understanding of data.
rise and fall at the same time does not mean ice
cream causes drowning. Rather, the two trends
have a common correlation, which is summer.
Data scientists are needed to create the guardrails
that prevent their business colleagues from
making misguided decisions based on inadequate
understanding of data.
The Magic of Ownership
A tried-and-true approach to achieving the right
balance of resources is to create small teams of
people who have ownership of subsets of data that
are relevant to their business function.
The team is accountable for making sure the right
data is employed, kept current and applied to the
right problems. If there are inaccuracies, it’s the
team’s job to fix them. Collaboration is essential.
Any BI tool the organization uses should have
built-in capabilities for sharing, commenting and
building upon each team member’s work.
The BI platform should be flexible enough to
respond to requirements that aren’t yet known
and enable all parts of the organization to build
their own models so technical staff can focus on
the biggest problems. As users experiment and
discover new opportunities, they can bid for the
technical resources to develop them.
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Configuration settings and user inputs should
drive algorithms that users can change as needed.
Governance policies should be defined with the
assumption that people may freely experiment
within the data domains to which they have access.
Good governance, combined with strong security
and audit controls, can protect sensitive data while
giving users greater freedom to be curious.
Legacy BI systems, particularly those based on a
client-server model, limit an organization’s data
governance capabilities because of the difficulty
of monitoring activity on PC endpoints. The
organization’s response is usually to tightly restrict
data access at the server level. A better response is
to free up data and use audit and access controls
to regulate who uses it and how.
Benefits of Cloud-Based BI
Modern cloud-based solutions shift processing to
a scalable server and give administrators the tools
to achieve the proper balance of data access and
security. They can see visual representations of how
data is always flowing through the pipeline as well as
login attempts, data use, user activity and the status
of data sets in real time. Alerts can be set to fire
when anomalies or data problems are detected.
Administrators can create entitlement policies
that govern access to specific data in a data set for
individuals and groups. They can use predefined
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security profiles for administrators, privileged
users, editors and participants or create their
own. Organizations can choose the security model
that works best for them, including zero trust and
least privilege, integrated with single sign-on and
certificates to minimize user inconvenience.
Self-service shouldn’t be confused with self-
sufficiency. An apt analogy is the soda dispensers
in fast food restaurants. A few years ago, many
chains moved dispensers out from behind the
counter and let customers take care of pouring
their own drinks. But that didn’t make customers
self-sufficient. Specialists are needed behind the
scenes to ensure that enough carbonation and
syrup are available, that the mix is adjusted to
deliver the correct flavor and that diners have the
cups, lids and straws they need. Soda fountains
must also be maintained, repaired and cleaned to
meet sanitation requirements.
Data Democracy in Practice
Organizations that have reinvented and
democratized BI are seeing some dramatic results.
Here are three examples:
• The high-growth hearing care company
audibene suffered from limited visibility
into its business because data was siloed in
departments and applications. As a result, BI
adoption was low. The company brought in
Domo for its visualization, sharing and reporting
features as well as its ability to plug into the
company’s existing data warehouse. Teams
now have one constantly updated version of
the truth that’s visible to everyone. Users who
used to wait two weeks for reports now build
their own. More than 100 custom dashboards
have been created for functions like finance,
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 marketing, sales and human resources. “We’re
able react to the market faster and smarter,”
says Dan Schofield, head of analytics and data
operations.2
• Real estate marketplace Zillow also wrestled
with silos that limited efficiency in billing the
company’s advertising customers at the end of
each month. Different teams were responsible
for different ad platforms, and creating bills
was a multistep process that took about 30
hours per month. Automating the process with
Domo resulted in a 90% reduction in billing
time. Following on that success, Zillow also put
Domo to work extracting data from a variety
of automation platforms to monitor successes
and failures in real time. As word spread, the
company created its own governance guidelines
and courseware to enable employees to
come up to speed at their own pace. “Domo
removes all the hassle by putting data at your
fingertips without having to get messy,” says
Brandon Ankuda, senior analyst for enterprise
applications.3
• Edrington-Beam Suntory struggled with
consolidating data from numerous third-party
sources, lengthy manual reporting processes
and outdated sales data insights. The result was
inefficient sales reporting, long reporting times
and outdated data. By implementing Domo,
2 “Can you create full data governance, and still offer access to everyone?” Domo.
3 “What if one platform could optimize finance, marketing and IT,” Domo.
4 “Improving retail distribution sales productivity with data and analytics,” Domo.
It’s a New Era in Business Intelligence, Enabled by the Cloud
© 2020 Domo. This content was commissioned by Domo and produced by TechTarget Inc.
the company was able to build dashboards
that provide sales data and brand and market
share information about individual brands at a
granular level. Monthly sales reports that once
took three days are now finished in less than
an hour. By streamlining internal processes, the
company has realized a 72% increase in overall
productivity while time spent on sales calls has
increased nearly 40%.4
It’s Time to Leverage
the Cloud
The proliferation of cloud services and solutions
has been transforming industries and disrupting
long-established business models over the past
decade. The shift of BI to the cloud is the latest
step in this evolution.
Companies that are able to leverage intelligence
quickly and easily, and spread it across their
workforces, can achieve significant competitive
benefits, cost savings, improvements in
productivity and morale and faster, easier access
to innovation.
It is important, however, to deploy a BI platform
that was designed of the cloud and for the cloud.
Visit Domo.com/Leverage to see how data-
empowered companies are getting leverage.
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