Core Concepts: Create a Single Source of Truth for Your Data

Learn more about the value Mode has seen internally from using Core Concepts in our webinar.

As the turn of the year approaches, teams are starting to think about new goals.

When companies go through annual planning, they build new objectives and targets for the year. This has two important implications for the data team. First, people around the company want to track progress toward these goals. Second, these goals often feature some new KPIs.

With an urgent focus on goals, data teams can expect a rush of new questions about things that they may not have been asked about before, like new product KPIs, hiring KPIs, and new campaigns.

This leaves data teams with a challenge: With new initiatives across the company, how can you make sure everyone has the data they need when they need it?

Core Concepts—our solution to empowering everyone to explore the data they need

To help teams access and explore key business KPIs, we’re recommending that companies use our own internal model of Core Concepts to build a strategic single source of truth for your data in Mode.

Built for exploration and not status tracking, Core Concepts can show you if your early Q1 and Q2 initiatives are having an impact and whether you need to pivot your focus as discoveries are made.

What are Core Concepts?

Core Concepts are suites of Mode reports designed to help people find and explore useful data as it pertains to overall business health.

This central hub of reports should bring together priority data from each business unit to help teams answer their questions and shorten the data team’s “help request” queue.

Data featured could include purchases, users, and website traffic. The important thing is that Core Concepts reflect what’s unique to your business. This means partnering with domain experts to see what teams are asking and selecting data at the root of their questions. We’ll expand on this in our webinar.

Core Concepts are also designed to be explorable so folks can answer a wide range of questions. They’re built on dimensional, unaggregated data that can be filtered and aggregated to allow for flexible analysis.

When done well, Core Concepts can help your company:

- Increase data discovery to help teams find the appropriate data to use in analyses. - Improve data documentation to help everyone make the best conclusion from data. - Intercept data duplication to reduce confusion on similar reports. - Prevent data decay to avoid decisions made on outdated data.

Core Concepts is a step toward a more democratic data ecosystem with a preference on featuring the most up-to-date data. Data teams shouldn’t have to learn a new query language to create a single source of truth for company-wide data, they can do it using SQL in Mode.

For tips on making a valuable central source of data, watch our webinar on Core Concepts.