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 This was expensive, error-prone, and data was often outdated.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

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

Boris Evelson wrote and interesting  blog, “How Do We Define a BI Vendor”, on the Information Management site. It’s a great summary of the features that characterize a BI vendor (or product), but IMHO it’s missing the most vital characteristic of the all, data access to the right data.

BI analytics is useless without the right data.  No advanced BI feature can compensate for not having access to the most relevant and timely data.

Unfortunately for business analysts, a growing volume of relevant BI data is locked in Web sites beyond the reach of any standard data access method available in BI products on the market today.

Fortunately there is a solution; it’s called Web Data Services, a convenient, economical way to access data through an existing Web presentation layer (the same interface used by normal Web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). Web Data Services can both consolidate Web data into a standard database or wrap it into standard Web services, both of which can then be easily consumed by any BI product on the market.

Suddenly business analysts can access all the data they know from their application interfaces directly in the BI tools.

Jim Ericson recently wrote a nice article ( Net Expectations -What a Web data service economy implies for business ) about the value of Web Data Services in which he digs in to all the aspects of using the Web as a new way to get data that’s faster and more cost-effective.

The article includes this quote by longtime BI analyst Howard Dresner:

“The nice thing about Web data services… is that it’s easy, it’s relatively inexpensive to create or consume and it’s immediate. Business doesn’t want to wait until next quarter, and IT is gravitating this way too because they have only so much budget and so many people.”

What a powerful statement. With Web Data Services, it suddenly becomes easy, inexpensive and immediate to obtain data access, something I am sure many IT departments will praise while they struggle to deliver the necessary data in-time and within-budget to their increasingly data-hungry Lines of Business.

What is unique about the Kapow Web Data Server is that it can get you the data even when no APIs exist by leveraging the Web presentation layer interface that always exists on the Web.

Even if there is an API, the no coding robotic approach by Kapow Technologies is typically a lot faster and  an easier way to access the data.

Think about it. If I am a business analyst and need Salesforce.com data in my BI dashboard, I really don’t want to learn about Salesforce APIs and program lines of code. I’d much rather just point at the data with my mouse in the Kapow RoboMaker Visual IDE, and get data access directly the way I am used to. Here at Kapow Technologies we have dozens of these “robots” integrating SalesForce with Marketo (our marketing automation tool), our Emails in Microsoft Exchange, Jigsaw, our customer bug tracking system, our ERP systems, and so on… and we would never dream about using the APIs.

To make my final point, go back to Jim Ericson’s article to learn more about how Fiserv uses the Kapow Web Data Server to integrate with 300 banks in 10 countries, all with no coding. It’s an impressive real-life story about the value of Web Data Services.

As always, please send me your comments, my email is SA at kapowtech dot com

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