Drum roll please. Here we go: part one in a series of several posts.
There’s a fundamental and growing conflict in today’s workplace. Corporations look to individual productivity as a means to drive profitability. In many, if not most businesses, that means getting better at managing and using information. And the tools we all have for data management as individuals are failing.
For example, search is great. But if you don’t have the right keyword, you get garbage results. And having the right keyword is dependent on knowing enough about the data you are searching for. How many hours have you wasted looking for a document or email you KNOW you have somewhere???
Not to mention that there’s a ton of data out there that isn’t easily searchable (images, video, audio etc).
Every company you look at relies on a whole bunch of different data management tools and data sources. Network servers, email, intranets, wiki’s, sharepoint portals, hosted apps like Salesforce, proprietary apps and databases and that teensy thing called the Internet. Individuals are forced to deal with each data source and tool separately, resulting in many points of contact and many different sets of rules on how to find and use data.
And that sucks. It’s wasteful and inefficient. One of the potential customers I talked to told me it took him 3 months to get up to speed with all of his employers data systems.
Corporations have been using data integration and business intelligence tools to deliver strategic insights from the top down. We are building tools that deliver operational ability from the bottom up.
More to come soon…