Domo Is Taking Data Governance Seriously

Domo Is Taking Data Governance Seriously

Today, organizations of all sizes consume massive amounts of data. These big data volumes combined with the ongoing push for self-service business intelligence (BI), have enabled more people to do analysis and build visualizations and dashboards.

This is all well and good, but increases in analysis and self-service have led to data governance issues. For example, business users often do not know what content to trust and how to use it. Governance issues have also developed a need for BI on BI, as in using BI to analyze BI user activity, data use, etc.

While discussing these issues at the recent Domopalooza user conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, Paul Weiskopf, senior vice president of Corporate Development at Domo, said, “We’ve enabled customers to have all their relevant business data in one place. Now tons of flowers start blooming - there’s so much analysis being done and insights shared that we need to help our customer better manage it all.”

At the conference, Domo announced upcoming (midsummer) releases of several new enhancements that address data governance issues:

Certifications. Soon, Domo customers will be able to leverage a new flexible workflow engine to certify cards, data sets, and beast modes (calculations). In addition, each department can personalize its certification process and create different levels of certification, and users can see the status of requests. Certified content will also show up first in content searches. These upgrades make it easier for users to certify more content and know which content to trust and which content to be wary of.

DataSet Context. This feature enables users to modify the definition and description of a new data set. This will help other users understand how a new data set should be used and thought about, guiding proper data use. In addition, Mr. Roboto, Domo’s umbrella term for its data science features, automatically analyzes data sets and identifies data hygiene issues.

DomoStats. The DomoStats dashboard contains data about organizations’ data and use of Domo, such as content use, user activity, and status of data sets. Users can filter out irrelevant content to customize the dashboard. This built-in BI on BI will help customers track usage and adoption and is key to a successful BI program.

What’s Next?

At the final keynote of Domopalooza ’18, the Domo product team announced a couple sneak peaks of future enhancements that address data governance. Auto data wrangling will suggest data transformations to new data sets and identify invalid rows and optimal column organization. And Major Domo Center is a personalized page that will display trends and activity within data which particular users, sub-groups, and departments need to attend to or monitor.

As a self-service tool, Domo’s new data governance features are steps in the right direction. Self-service, if improperly governed, has the potential to increase poor decision-making, and these features will help customers mitigate that problem, but they won’t resolve the issue alone. Customers will still need to employ data governance best practices in addition to these features to run a successful BI program.

For Further Reading On Data Governance Check Out:

Henry H. Eckerson

Henry Eckerson covers business intelligence and analytics at Eckerson Group and has a keen interest in artificial intelligence, deep learning, predictive analytics, and cloud data warehousing. When not researching and...

More About Henry H. Eckerson