Think about how we can help people define organizations correctly

[jon-betts]

At a high-level, what is the task?

• Designing a set of separate entities for a customer you want to see
• Ensuring the records exist in Hubspot for each entity
• Ensuring there is an organization for each entity you want
• Linking Hubspot Companies to those organizations by organization id
• Finding all of the application instances related to each entity
• Assigning them to the correct organizations

Things we are missing now

• Ideally we should stop the rot before it begins
  • Our process should give us complete control over customer data from the start
  • This would prevent us from having to guess later
  • It also prevents good work being un-done / corrupted by automated assignments on new application instance creation
• We have a difficult decision about how to arrange our organizations because we are missing hierarchy
  • If we have hierarchy we don't need to compromise
  • We'd have some interesting decisions and challenges to calculated numbers as a result
  • I suspect arranging orgs into a hierarchy is a simpler job than defining them

What we've learned about matching

• You need a customer design in mind, before you can interpret the information you see in LMS
  • The same info might mean different things depending on your desired customer design
  • There can be no automated process, only tools & helpers
• More recent info is more relevant than old info
• We can't handle a single application instance being used across two entities we'd like to report separately on
  • ... but customers have an incentive not to do this, because they want the numbers too
• There are some fields which are indicators of how to group application instances:
  • Tool Consumer Instance Name / Description (Application instance)
  • Tool Consumer Instance GUIDS - Although we are largely grouped like this already
  • Email domains (Application instance / group)
  • LMS URLs (Application instance / group)
  • Names (Groupings)
• There are two types of general matching work:
  • Identifying application instances you don't know about which are related to the organizatios you are trying to define
  • Allocating those application instances between the organizations correctly

Small tasks we can achieve

• Application instances should have a name we control, like organizations have
  • At the moment they only have what we get from LTI
  • This means even if we identify them, we can't give them meaningful names
• We should show application instances in Report
• We should be able to search groupings in Report (likely we'll get this as a part of course info)