Ally's Looker integration allows automated real-time tracking of OKR progress. Say, for example, you maintain the sales reports inside Looker dashboards and you have an objective to achieve a target of 50 Sales Demos within a specific time period. Using the Looker integration, you can set up a connection to an OKR in Ally with a "demos booked" metric. Ally will automatically sync the values for you and chart your progress toward the goal, thus saving time while keeping your OKRs current.
Enabling the Looker Integration
An Ally Admin can enable the Looker Integration in Ally. To do so:
Navigate to Ally’s integrations page through Admin > Integrations.
Scroll through the list until you reach Looker. Select "Enable" (Or "Manage" if a connection has been made previously.)
The integration can also be disabled at any time from the same section.
Configuring the Looker Connection
In the Connections section, click on the 'New Connection', and in the popup that appears, follow the prompt to enter the name of the connection and the API credentials provided to you by your looker administrator. You can optionally choose to share the connection with other users in the organization and click "Save." You can edit the saved connection anytime.
Connecting the Looker Integration to an OKR
Once the setup is complete, users in your organization can link their OKRs to Looker dashboards and looks.
1. While creating (or editing) an OKR, click on "Connect data source to auto-update progress."
2. From the list of integrations, select "Looker."
3. If you already created a Looker connection or an administrator in your organization shared a Looker connection with you, that will automatically be selected. If there are no connections created or shared already, Ally will prompt you to add a new connection. If you have more than one connection with Looker, you can choose the connection you’d like to use.
Note: Looker Integration is available only for the 'KPI (success metric)' method of measuring OKR success and not available for the '% completion' method.
4. Once the connection is selected, you can choose to ‘Track KPI from’ either a dashboard or a look. Once you've chosen a dashboard or a look, you can further narrow it down to a specific dashboard tile or a look name. Select the tile or look that has the data you want to be connected to the OKR.
5. Choose a KPI metric that is available from the selected tile or look. Depending on the type of visualization, there could be multiple values for the KPI, broken down by a dimension. For example, say you have the demos set up metric broken down by your sales team members as part of the Looker tile, you can choose to apply a simple metric/sum/average/count on the set of values (or) filter out by a particular person or any available filter field.
6. Ally displays the selected value for your reference before you save the data link set-up.
7. Once you are satisfied, click "Save" and continue to save your OKR. You should now see a Looker icon next to the OKR - Ally will automatically count up the finished number of demos setup. The OKR syncs automatically every hour, but you can refresh it manually by clicking on the Looker icon and selecting the "Sync Now" option.
The colors of the progress bars indicate the status of the Objective.
If the progress is 0-25% less than expected progress at any point in time, the status is Behind (orange)
If the progress is over 25% less than expected progress at any point in time, the status is At-Risk (red)
Learn more about Ally’s other integrations here.