Data assembly is now the biggest barrier to good analytics

Business Intelligence continues to become more and more strategic to companies in order to compete in today’s global economy. Every department is now using analytics to better understand financials, business processes, customers, competitors and market trends – critical understanding needed to optimize execution.

As we all know, analytics is no better than the data behind it, and thus discovery and assembly of data has become an ever more important part of successful business intelligence.

As your company ecosystem grows beyond your firewall into partner apps, competitor websites and social networks, data rapidly spreads and more and more data assembly is now tied up in manual harvesting methods or the purchase of dubious data from vertical information providers.

This means that the knowledge worker spends more time with Data Discovery and Data Assembly, leaving less time for analysis of and execution on the results.

I often see scenarios where knowledge workers spend more than 50% of their time on just data assembly, time which takes away from analysis, reporting and execution.

This is not good.

And it’s exactly why more companies rely on automating the data assembly process. Finding methods to easily and scalably instruct which data to get from where and how to transform it into the needed format – basically they look for a solution to do automated data delivery.

The good news is that this solution already exists. The Kapow Katalyst platform is proven by more than 500 companies all over the world.

Here’s a concrete example. Fiserv, a large financial services company, needed to understand the value of their assets in real-time for compliance reasons. To solve this problem the treasurer hired a group of people to manually log-in to Fiservs accounts spread over more than 300 banks in more than 20 countries. This was expensive, error-prone, and data was often outdated.

Consequently, Fiserv looked for an automated solution and found Kapow Katalyst. Within 3 months they had built Kapow ETL robots that could automatically log-in to the web front-end of Fiserv accounts at all 300 banks and pull out the required information. Not only did this relieve the knowledge workers from manual data assembly it also gave the treasurer real-time data for point-in-time regulatory compliance.

Needless to say this created a lot of value for Fiserv.

I recommend you read the whitepaper, Hyper Management of Working Capital, written by Thomas W. Warsop, Group President for Fiserv.

By: Stefan Andreasen

There is huge growth in mobile everywhere. Every day we see this by the proliferation of fancy mobile devices like iPhone, Android, and iPad, but what we might not consider as strongly is how we all shift more and more of our internet activities over to mobile devices.

Is this possibly the end to PCs and Laptops?

Read this article Bye-Bye, PCs and Laptops from the Wall Street Journal online to learn more.

But how does your future company growth on mobile compare to your growth on the internet?

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures gives a great perspective in the article Mobile Economics Will Trend Toward Web Economics.

On the internet you pay a fixed monthly fee for “unlimited” access, while traditionally on mobile devices you paid per minute. Not so anymore. With high speed 3G and 4G networks and tons of mobile applications like Skype you can already make calls from your mobile without a per minute charge, plus you can leverage an ever increasing amount of mobile marketplaces, monitoring services, and automation services directly from your mobile device without the need for a fixed internet connection or PC.

So how does this affect your business?

Well you better have a mobile enablement strategy, and you better get your B2C/B2E applications mobile enabled before you miss the boat, because your customers are already mobile, and the more your procrastinate, the more market share you could lose.

As soon as you ask your IT department to mobile enable your B2C marketplace or B2E productivity tool, your first challenge will begin.

Most of the applications your company owns have been written over several years, without the slightest thought they would one day need to be modernized for mobile devices. Before you can even consider extending these web applications to mobile, you need to API or Web Service enable them to have a solid interface foundation upon which you can build your new mobile interfaces. Unfortunately, the most common answer you’ll hear back from IT is:  “it will take more than a year to mobile enable our current applications”.

One dramatically different and much faster approach to “fix” this is to just “wrap” your existing applications into web services. Kapow Katalyst can do this for you in days or weeks, rather than the months or years of traditional recoding projects.

Check out how Audi, Pearson, and other large international companies have succeeded with an ultra-fast go-to market mobilization solution.

It’s actually mind-boggling how fast the right technology can get you mobilized.

Check it out.

By: Stefan Andreasen