The data to your solution is there. Now, how do you access it?
Technology should serve us. Not the other way round.
At Untrite, we think that the current way of working and drawing from company knowledge is broken. That’s why we’re on the mission of giving people control back over how they interact with data and knowledge locked in it.
If we are able to do that, employees could work more independently, test ideas and build on top of what’s already been created — company’s tribal knowledge. Management could be presented with solutions for approval, rather than problems on how to start.
To get there, we need to tackle one of the biggest problems today’s organisations still face: siloed data.
Data silos are isolated groups of data, either to specific systems or to specific teams. Among other issues, data silos are an obstacle for organisations trying to make smart business decisions and create a consistent customer experience, and they’re not at all uncommon.
According to survey conducted by DZone, only 2% of organisations believe they are effective at sharing data across their company, which makes this is a significant problem for the remaining majority.
Reinventing the wheel with data
I can still remember my days working as a management consultant, where I was placed on projects with many other consultants who had to learn about the issues (and often — the industry!) on the go.
Once, we were working on a M&A project to identify gaps between acquired systems. That meant, as soon as the project was done, many of staff from the acquired company was let go.
Finding the right person to ask for relevant information needed to compile a report was a task on its own. It became impossible if people who were holding that knowledge saw you as someone jeopardising and eventually, removing their work. That meant, often we were forced to start from scratch. I could sense frustration and resignation of my colleagues, but there was no better way to go about creating a new report, sales quote or analysing business gaps comparing them to past data.
If it exists but you don’t know about it, it’s as if it’s never been created in the first place.
As humans, we progressed due to our ability to learn and iterate on the past.
I believe that we could be doing so much better when it comes to the way we work. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we should be drawing from the expertise of our current and past colleagues who retired or left the company. Yet, accessing that knowledge is often a problem.
At most companies, it’s impossible to search through similar projects by relevance. Versioning and data visibility are among the most common problems employees encounter every single day. If you know a colleague who could help you or point you to a right direction to get the data you need— you’re in the luck.
- What if people in your organisation could work on their own, test ideas, and build on top of your organisation’s tribal knowledge?
- What if the management wouldn’t need to be involved each time someone encounters an information wall and doesn’t know whom to ask?
- What if you knew that e.g. the solution to your problem has already been documented in one of your colleague’s files? Should that file be private, you could at least be pointed to who is its owner.
- What if the management could be presented with solutions for approval rather with problems on how to start?
Why traditional ways of removing data silos don’t work.
Of course it’s no magic. The first step to removing data silos is linking data. A common way to crush data silos is to aggregate your data into a data warehouse or data lake. Migrating all your data to a central repository like these has a few benefits: data is accessible in one location, it consolidates information from disparate sources and protects sensitive data with strong security protocols.
That’s the theory. But how does it look in reality?
In my and my Untrite’s colleagues opinion, data lakes are not part of the modern data stack. Data lakes are legacy. There are organisational and quasi-political reasons why people adopt data lakes. But there are no longer technical reasons for adopting data lakes.
Data lakes can be very expensive to implement and maintain. Although some data lake platforms are open source and free of cost if you build and manage them yourself, doing so often takes months and requires expert (read: expensive) staff.
Another problem is that data is growing faster than compute power. This means that data lakes are getting bigger and bigger, but the computers required to host and manage them aren’t getting more powerful at the same rate. Without an efficient way to manage data within data lakes, businesses will end up paying more and more for the compute resources they need to handle their data.
Humans are creatures of habit and routine.
That’s why at Untrite we propose a completely different approach. We don’t replace your current systems as we understand that these are strategic investments. Instead, we provide a layer which sits on top of all your systems it has access to, reads them and by using NLP, a type of AI, understands all what’s in there.
I covered the angle of using AI to remove data silos here and here.
I’m extremely happy to be part of shaping the future of work. I believe an impact AI will have on our jobs is profound and increasingly capable of doing unbelievable things. It won’t automate the human entirely out of the equation, but rather will enable us to focus on things worth doing and provide us all the relevant data we need to work efficiently.
We work with knowledge-heavy industries and public organisations to improve their:
👉🏼 Client support — better view on information and past relevant cases means faster and more accurate response
👉🏼 M&As — large organisations have very complex taxonomy which are never fully unified. AI can automatically understand the context and derive connections between different names which talk about the same thing
👉🏼 Onboarding — all relevant materials are available for faster familiarity with your company’s know-how
👉🏼 Pre-sales — Quotation suggestion based on the past, similar projects
We’re on mission of giving people autonomy and tools to make smart decisions through AI. Join us.
Sign up for a demo at untrite.com/demo and see how we can transform how your organisation interacts with data.
