Some years ago, I worked with a votary of the “Net Promoter Score” (or NPS) who conceived it as the apex of all Customer Satisfaction metrics. He referred to “The Ultimate Question” as the methodology for gauging customer loyalty- “How likely is it that you’d recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?”
People in the field differ on the sanctity of NPS- of that there is no doubt. However, even for the naysayers, the simplicity of the methodology is compelling.
Borrowing from their playbook, I’d suggest a similar question for the Data Community. All potential investors and buyers should ask the question “Will this Data solution reduce my ‘Time to Value?’” In the Enterprise, there is nothing more crucial than this.
Most enterprise software has potential. All too often that potential is not transformed into kinetic energy. In the quest to embrace Digitization and transform organizations, grandiose visions are absolutely wonderful but so are practical and incremental changes that allow the business to flourish. Prosaic as they may be, enterprise solutions that connect IT and business users, allow users to access and act on Data, and increase productivity and thereby create space and time for creativity, are absolutely vital to Digital Transformation.
Timeframes are key in this process. With increasing competition, and an evolution towards agility and “pivoting” in business, companies are hard-pressed to stay leaders for long-stretches without real organizational innovations. The ability to learn, implement, hone, and revolve in truncated timeframes is foregrounded more than ever. Too often, the time-factor is glossed over; no matter how deliberate and planned Digital Transformation is, the quicker, well, the better.
With Data solutions no less. Most organizations of any appreciable size have troves of data in their corporate systems, waiting to be put into action. Reducing the time and easing the existing cumbersome processes by which this currently happens is in fact the precise sort of incremental change that is in fact as revolutionary as any innovation.
We built our accelerators for precisely this reason. Our large customers, to a one, suggested that a Data Strategy was core to their Digital Transformation. In each case, they had made prodigious investments in Data but the yarn that tied them all together was missing. They had data- very valuable data- resident in disparate systems and had no common framework or “transport system” to bring them into one place; without this, their investments in front-end data visualization and analytics systems were not reaching their potential. Conduit emerged from this crucible, as an easy to implement Data Transport solution that massively reduced time to value by harmonizing the needs of IT and the Business when it comes to Data.
We had in mind the Ultimate Question. And we built it to answer the question with a loud and excited “YES!”
