I recently read a great article about Data Urgency and how that relates to Data Value by Robin Bloor.

Robin’s writes “Data is urgent if it loses value while the receiver is waiting for it”.

Just think about the following analogy.

When you go to the supermarket to buy an apple, the price you’re willing to pay is directly related to how closely the apple looks like one you’d pick off a tree yourself, like this:

On the other if that apple isn’t fresh and tasty looking, it has no value at all.

This apple loses all its value between the time it was picked fresh and delicious from the tree and when it rotted and was delivered to you completely worthless.

Today I presented at the Corda Visual Evolution conference in Las Vegas.  I presented on “Using Kapow to enhance Corda CenterView with real-time Web data” where I discussed data urgency and how it relates to value.

One of the customer examples I presented was Fiserv and how they use Kapow to automatically aggregate financial account information from more than 300 banks in 10 countries and display the data in Corda’s CenterView dashboard for point in time regulatory compliance.

Previously, the treasury department had no other way to collect the bank data than to manually login to each of the 300 banks and cut and paste (i.e. pick) their financial transaction data into a spreadsheet. Due to the time it took to manually collect the data, not only was the data inaccurate, and thus out of compliance, but errors often arose due to the error-prone methods of manual data collection.

Thomas W. Warsop, Group President at Fiserv, wrote a detailed white paper about how “technology supports the work of corporate treasury” which you can download here to learn more.

Within Kapow’s customer base of almost 500 customers we see more and more examples of how “flawless data” is now “picked” 100% automatically, delivering critical real-time value to our customers.

The urgency of valuable data requires real-time automated data collection.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at Corda’s Visual Evolution User Conference. Corda’s CenterView product delivers a powerful Business Intelligence dashboard solution to improve performance management, while even allowing dashboard access from mobile devices such as your iPhone.

Corda CEO Neal Williams presented a 9 step KPI (Key Performance Indicator) process to identify driver and outcome metrics that matter most for creating successful Business Intelligence processes.  Interestingly, Neal explained that the selection of data sources is often the most flawed part of the process because most business analysts take a bottoms-up approach by choosing easy-to-get-to data sources which lead to suboptimal business decisions. Neal stressed the importance of taking a top-down approach, including a very careful analysis and selection process to determine which data sources create the most accurate and timely results.

It became very clear that our product can go a long way in ensuring business analysts get the best, freshest and most valuable data for their BI dashboard.  During my presentation, one person commented, “I asked my IT department for some critical data, data that I can easily access in my web browser, but the response was it could take 6-12 months to get the data”. With Kapow Web Data Server it would have taken at most, a few hours.

As an example, I encourage you to read the article, “Hyper Management of working capital:  Technology suport the work of corporate treasury“, which describes how FiServ uses Kapow robots to access complex, hard-to-get-to data sources residing at more than 300 banks spread over 10 countries. FiServ struggled with this problem for years with no other alternative than error-prone, manual cut-and-paste. Now successfully in production as a joint solution of Corda and Kapow Technologies, Fiserv is a great example how Kapow Web Data Server can help business analysts settle for nothing less than the best, most timely data sources.

Enjoy reading.

By:  Stefan Andreasen