What is our primary use case?
I was building executive dashboards for project management offices. I would have a portfolio of projects. Mainly, it was for opening new units and new markets. I would have project plans and action item logs, and I would use those in Smartsheet, and then I would ingest those up into Domo and I would be able to run statistics and metrics to track the progress of any given project. I would be able to calculate things like percent complete according to the calendar, percent complete of the budget, percent complete of the scope, number of tasks, percentage of tasks against total tasks, et cetera.
I could, for each project, if I wanted to drill down, go in, and see the detail of the tasks. I could also go see the action items, the risks, the issues, and the action items associated with the project. Therefore, I could see how many of those there were, what were critical, high, medium, or low, and which ones were late in terms of the due dates and things like that. I could run both a general project status meeting for a given project and also, at a high level, show a swift health check of a set of projects. That was very helpful for the executives.
What is most valuable?
Domo is very strong.
In general, Domo is very powerful and very easy to use, relatively speaking. And so I didn't have a lot of complaints. I'm unsure if I was fully tasking it and stressing the Domo system.
What needs improvement?
There were very few cases on some of the tables, the data tables, where I wish there was an additional feature or two. However, they were particular. What I wanted to see was the ability to collapse when you group a set of rows, let's say when you group them by status or health, so you have your red projects grouped up top. I wanted to compress or collapse that group of red and then open the yellow projects and then the green projects. There were a bit more features in the tables than I wanted to see.
They have a widget that you can use either in Microsoft PowerPoint to pull over data into your PowerPoints and refresh graphs or charts or metrics or tables. I would love to see that available in Google Slides. I used it successfully in PowerPoint; however, at one company, they were only using Google products, and so that widget didn't help with reporting in slides. Therefore, we had to do a bit more manual work for our quarterly business reviews or monthly business reviews to produce our executive presentations.
Sometimes the fonts were difficult to read if you're trying to put a lot of data in a table and show a lot of rows. Sometimes the fonts got too light, and you had to really play with it to try and figure out how to make it readable.
One thing I had to do, and I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing, was when I was running a meeting, I would have to go turn off the data jobs. If I was running a meeting and a lot of times people were scrambling in the background to do their updates even as the meeting was occurring, it would cause the page to render very slowly. It would sometimes pause or freeze. I found that if I went and turned off the status, the data update jobs that we're pulling data from Smartsheet, then the meetings would work more smoothly, and there were no interruptions or delays.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started using the solution since 2019. I just finished a job and used it up until this month.
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Domo
March 2023
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable. I never had it crash or go out of service.
I’ve never witnessed performance problems like graphs taking a while to render, things like that, only when there were data updates going on in the background.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I never saw any scalability problems. There’s probably not a scalability issue. It’s just if you've got multiple processes hitting the same data source. Sometimes it has to wait for the data to update. Perhaps maybe there's a way in bigger organizations where there's a lot more going on where that could become a problem, and you might have to schedule how that gets done.
I had everything set to real-time, meaning if a database update was made over in Smartsheet, it would immediately notify Domo and start to pull the data over. However, if I had set it to do it every hour or two times a day or something, then that wouldn't have interrupted the project meetings.
It scales pretty well. My data set was not big. I didn't have millions of records or billions of records, so I never really stressed the system. I had 100,000 records or less across all my entities.
At one company, it was being used across all the major teams. There's a data engineering team and a finance team that was using it for the general ledger reporting. Operations were using it, and those operations encompassed a large number of things. That included procurement, construction, hospitality, training teams, and HR teams. So it was fairly broad. However, we were a small division in the company, so it was less than 100 users.
At another organization, I was the only real power user. However, there were 35 people when I left that was given access and were using the reports or had access to the reports. It was not that many in the grand scale of an enterprise or big business.
How are customer service and support?
I don't remember opening a ticket. I did at one company when we had a professional services team helping us set up the instance, and we had a success manager, who were all very skilled. For most of my time there, I was able to work with the implementation team that was able to answer any of my questions, or if there was any logic I was trying to work out, like to take daily snapshots is something that you need to be shown how to do, they could help. That said, once you have the model, you can copy it and replicate it across to other data sets.
I’ve never had a bug and do not remember saying "This system's not working."
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had Tableau. However, the problem with Tableau is it was part of the corporate team, and you had to wait a long time to get at least the way they set it up, where you had to make a request to get your data into the data warehouse. Then, it had to get loaded and cleaned and architected and then approved and pushed out to the production instance. You could start to run your reports after that. They might have to structure it so we just gave up on Tableau since it was such a heavy enterprise system, the way that the one company was using it.
That's the reason why the chief technical officer for our division brought in Domo, as it was a rapid solution that users could get in there, and analysts could start working right away and running reports and analyzing data. That's the only comparison I have. We were a Microsoft shop, and I don't know why we didn't consider Power BI. However, Smartsheet was the tool that was being used, so it didn't really come up as an option. My guess is if I go to my next Microsoft shop, I'll use Power BI instead of Domo since it's probably already in-house and cheaper, and it's pretty flexible and fast.
A company that I used to work for switched over to Power BI.
How was the initial setup?
I was able to have my PMO executive dashboards up and running in a couple of weeks. It's straightforward. If what you want to do, it's swift and easy. Like my data is projects, the tasks, the projects, and the action items. If I have budget data, I pull in budget data as well. Then, I just need to make sure I know how those three link up on the keys. And if that's done correctly, then you can immediately start building the dashboards and linking in all the data. To get it to work out what the executives want to see is just iterative, but you can have something that an executive can see very rapidly, just in a couple of weeks, if not sooner. If that was the only thing I had to do, I could get something up and running very quickly.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I had an enterprise license.
It started out at about $600 a seat. However, then as we started to grow, it scaled that down to about $330 or 3$50 a seat, if I'm not mistaken. Obviously, it's scaled pricing. When I was using it previously, they had the full enterprise license, and they'd negotiated an even lower price.
I don't know if I know the cost when you compare it to all other types of software that are being used across the business. Perhaps it's cheaper than Tableau. However, I don't know all that. However, it was a tricky part of the approval process for me to get that approved due to the price tag. It wasn't tricky at the other organization I worked for, as the CTO knew what he wanted it. He's a very senior member of staff and has a big budget. He was able to get that approved.
What other advice do I have?
I am just an end-user.
I’m not sure which version we’re using. It's a software as a service solution, so it's the latest one. I wasn't using all of the capabilities of the tool.
I’d advise other users that it goes much faster if you really have a sense of what your data. I have an immaculate, apparent picture of my data in my head. It's straightforward. Its projects, tasks, its action items, and budget information are great. As long as you know how you're going to link that up and what you want to be able to analyze. For example, I want to be able to see over time that my issues are coming down. They're shrinking by the day. I want to see a daily snapshot of the total number of issues on my projects. If you have that type of clarity, you can set up your system and data routines reasonably quickly.
After that, it's really just, how do you want to display it? That's just iterative and working with some fairly straightforward widgets. To get your data nice and clean, ensure you understand how it will all hang together. That’s what's nice about Domo. You don't have to formally create a data model behind the scenes, as long as your data from one table to the next has the same column with the same name, then when those. When you put different widgets on the page, you can configure the page to each all of the widgets on that page to respond to that same key.
They'll all filter on the same key even though one data type may be tasks and the other one might be action items. If you have the project ID in both of those data sets, then they'll both filter. Therefore, you don't have to go through a lot of complex data modeling or formalized data modeling. Just knowing your data is probably the key - or at least it was for me. My data set wasn't as complicated as perhaps others.
I’d rate the solution eight out of ten. It was pretty expensive.
The cost didn't justify keeping it around when you look and compare it to other existing tools in the business. That's why I might give it an eight. However, from a feature and functionality perspective, it's just a really straightforward, elegant tool. I like it.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.