Collaboration is happening everywhere. Companies are spending-and more importantly saving-big bucks through collaboration.
A CEO of a major technology company told us about what his company does with information from the hundreds of thousands of software downloads they receive each month:
We are collecting every piece of customer data we can. I told my team “do not throw anything out.” Now I want to give access to anybody in the company who wants to look at it. Executive dashboards are a nice view of some information, but I am the CEO and I am probably the least likely person in the company to make sense of this. Somewhere, someone is going to figure it out and make us an extra $1 billion.
When we talk about collaborative analytics, this is what we strive to enable. Data analysis today is a solitary task, Typically, a data analyst will work alone, emerging out of a spreadsheet or analytics program only long enough to say “is this right?”-then diving back in to try again. It’s a long and laborious process. And guess what-results often miss the mark.
How many stories have we heard about businesses making decisions without the right information? Someone in Lehman Brothers knew about Credit Default Swap exposure. Someone saw through Bernard Madoff’s scheme. If only that analyst could share his findings with others, invite people to help him solve the problem.
Meanwhile, technologies that encourage collaboration are spreading through the business world. Blogs, wikis, videoconferencing, social networks and more bring workers closer to peers, clients, partners and managers. Collaboration is happening everywhere it seems. Companies are spending-and more importantly saving-big bucks through collaboration.
It’s time to make last quarter’s KPIs as easy to find as last night’s viral video, mashing up the sales forecast with Google maps as easy as geo-tagging pictures of last summer’s trip. It’s time to let the employee who just might figure out a better way to segment your customers interact with the data himself.
