Kapow Katalyst Blog

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 This was expensive, error-prone, and data was often outdated.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

Earlier this month I attended the 2009 IBM Rational Software “As Real As It Gets” Conference in Orlando.

It was an inspiring conference full of belief and enthusiasm.  Jamie Thomas, VP Product Development, Delivery and Customer Support at IBM Rational, presented on the three drivers for increasing business productivity today:  Collaboration, Automation and Reporting.  I really enjoyed this presentation as it got me thinking about how inefficient many of our daily work routines are, and how much more fun work would be if we could improve or eliminate them.

As humans we are social animals, so we need collaboration to have fun, and the more fun we have, the faster we get more things done.

Collaboration

What is collaboration really? As I see it, it is all about 1+1=3. If we have the environment and tools to share and collaborate around our ideas and our work, employees (and their companies) will be far more productive. For LOBs this translates to building business models and business processes collaboratively, and being able to share any resulting data, process automation and insightful reports with our peers.

Automation
Unfortunately, there are still too many tedious manual processes involved in our daily work. We log in to supplier websites to check availability, search the web for the best hotel deal, or walk to and from our desk to type in data gathered at the assembly line.  Trivial manual processes are boring, unproductive, and inefficient.  We need tools to automate these processes. Tools that automatically log in to partner websites to check availability, search and compare hotel prices, and even wrap desktop applications into mobile devices for anytime access.

Reporting
Most business decisions are based on reports.  If these reports don’t exist already, we’re forced to create them.  Yet another boring manual process.  For example, we grab data from various business systems (company and partner apps and even info on the web) then we cut-and-paste into Excel to analyze it.  Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if we could automate all that data gathering and feed it in to a modern, sharable web application that could be built and modified as our ideas change?

I’d offer that we are more creatures of intellect than creatures of habit.  Let’s get the right tools to drive more collaboration, automation, and reports that can drive more business insight.

Any great examples of Collaboration-Automation-Reporting you’d like to share that have had a strong impact where you work?

By:  Stefan Andreasen