The Perfect Match

Today at work I was interviewing some candidates for a position we have been trying to fill for quite some time now but haven't been able to find a good match. This experience got me thinking can PAW be a "perfect match"?.

Today was also billing day, the two days in the month when I am drowning in numbers, pulling multiple time sheets for all my direct reports working with multiple excel worksheets. In these two days I will have worked over 10-12 hours per day pulling reports, summarizing them, matching and merging finally building out my worksheets to be sent to my finance department for billing.

Month after month there is all this manual labor involved in putting together these workbooks. This prompted me to think of getting a software product that would help reduce it. It would be so nice to get back 4-6 hours. A 50% in time saving ---> SWEET. I opened PAW started to build my monthly time reporting worksheet from scratch. It took me about an hour to set-up and automate the process the way I wanted it. I tested it and it worked. I wondered if there was something out there that could do everything I had in my head, PAW only addresses 85% of the steps I envisioned.

On the drive back home I realized that next month I will only have to do 15% of the work as PAW will automatically do the balance 85% and export the excel file to me, that made me so happy. In today's world of instant gratification where software only gets cheaper, faster, better one has to realize "the perfect match" is also changing constantly, whats in today is out tomorrow, whats considered hot today is dead tomorrow. I now look at PAW in a new light my PERFECT MATCH light my solution for today, tomorrow will bring something that is faster cheaper better. Until then I have found my PERFECT MATCH.

Marketing Challenge

I have been working in the field of marketing for quite a few years now. Most of my job involves interaction with data in some level or another. Some things I regularly working on are - getting data files of customers for my next email campaign, status of payments received from a particular client, or simply an export of all the responses from my marketing survey.

Every time I get data I have to spend time doing some processing to it so that I can visualize it in a fashion that is understandable to me. Today I was faced with such a situation and PAW came to my rescue.

Today, I received twelve files of data exported in excel from a vendor who implemented one of my customer survey's. All of the raw data I collected was important to me however in addition to this raw data there was more value in analyzing the following -

1. 1. How many of my customers completed more than one survey?
   
2. 2. What is the number of new customers to the email file vs. my control?
3. 3. Isolate email addresses that have subscribed to my monthly newsletter
4. 4. Isolate the email addresses that have shown an interest in my next webinar

Traditionally, I had to have someone from my team or the database manager right some SQL query's to parse this information and send it to my team. In the PAW world today, I or some one from my team pulls all the information in PAW and withing the hour has all the various data files ready to send to the various teams.

Merging or de-duping data takes minutes in PAW even for large files (each of my files had over 35k rows in it) and what's even better is that I don't have wait for other teams to send me the parsed data. My email marketing campaigns are more releveant as they are sent out in a timely fashion bringing more ROI and revenue to PAW.

Automating your daily work - dealing with web logs

For techies, there's many many tools to automate things. Lots of scripting languages, multiple open source libraries, articles and tutorials on sites like IBM developerworks & ServerSide. All that's required is an inclination to automate and time.

For more of a business user, there's not really a tool that makes it easy to automate. You can either find a service that solves your problem, hire someone to write some scripts and then keep paying them to make updates when things change, do the thing less often but in the good old-fashioned manual way.

PAW is intended to help the business user automate their work... the repetitive part. You can download files from a server (there's a tutorial on this), you can import and parse the file, find the specific data points, and then summarize it. If necessary, you can combine your web log data with information in your customer database. Things like the # of page hits in a session measured against when they registered on your website.

Best of all, you do small bits in PAW and see the results right away. If something doesn't work, you know right away and can fix it. You're working on your data, kind of like what you do in a spreadsheet.

We would love to get feedback on whether this mix of being able to automate and see your results quickly is the right blend of immediacy, automation, and ad-hoc processing.

Bookmarking data

When the browser was introduced, one of the first innovations to really take off was the bookmark. We got used to bookmarking pages containing useful information... Similarly, very often, in the work environment, we are trying to keep on top of a few critical pieces of information. It might be the project budget, sales to date for my region, or updates to certain bugs that I need to re-test. Our goal is to allow the user to link to that piece of information and bring it into the user's context, rather than the user needing to open up the application or web page and then navigate to find that piece of data.

With the PAW tool, you can define the process to get to those snippets of information, in some cases calculated. Then you can very easily get updates for that data in the PAW environment. In essence, you've bookmarked that data!