You may have heard that my company, Semphonic, recently published the Omniture Implementation Toolkit. By way of a story - my own "How I learned Omniture" story - here's why I believe it's a worthwhile investment:
Back in 2005 I was doing contract work in web analytics. I'd just landed a gig at a big company in Silicon Valley. They'd had a plain-vanilla Omniture tag on their site for a couple of years, but they weren't getting much return on investment. They hired me, I think, just so they'd have someone around who gave a sh*t about the data.
I had been using web analytics tools for a respectable 5 years by that point, mostly logfile-based custom data warehousing solutions. This company brought me on board knowing full well that I had never used Omniture before, that in fact I had never used a page-tagging solution before. I still feel fortunate that they hired me with faith in my ability to pick up new skills on the job.
I spent the first few days at my new workplace learning people's names, learning the org chart, learning the unavoidable dialect of cryptic business acronyms.
Sometime during that settling-in period one of my coworkers appeared at my cube, silent, holding a giant ream of printer paper. He dropped the unbound stack - bam - from about 2 feet up, onto my desk. The look in his eye could only mean, "Good luck with this. You're gonna need it." He turned and left. I read the stack's cover sheet: "Omniture."
What did I do next? Well, I read that whole pile of documentation. I bookmarked the knowledge base. I memorized the support hotline number. I figured out how to modify the tag and test my changes. I made mistakes, I fixed them, and I learned. Eventually I found ways to connect my colleagues with meaningful data they could actually use.
Granted, I did all of this without the Toolkit. But if it had existed then, it would have been a valuable supplement to Omniture's official literature. And, since it's based on Semphonic's collective experience actually doing successful Omniture implementations, I know it would have saved me the trouble of learning all the details the hard way on my own. I could have gotten through my trial-and-error phase faster, and I could have made informed implementation decisions with more conviction from the start.
This is basically what Gary Angel said when he made the baseball analogy in his recent blog post. My story is just one concrete example of how, when, and by whom the Toolkit ought to be used. You can learn more about the Toolkit here.
I will be at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City on March 4-7. If you see me there, I invite you to tell me your own "How I learned Omniture" story.
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