By Art Porth
CTO, Instant Intelligence Inc.
I was in a boardroom last month with a CFO I’d never met before. She was walking through her analytics dashboard. Beautiful, data rich. As she scrolled through performance metrics, cash positions, and predictive models, she said, “You know I have all these charts, graphs and metrics about everything, and yet I’m still not clear what actions I should be taking, right now.” Unfortunately, this is what I hear all the time.
Figuring Out What Good Looks Like
I spent my career building enterprise systems. Financial systems. Operational platforms. Analytics engines. Supply chain networks. Every single one was brilliant at what it did. Orders would flow through operational systems with precision. Data would load into analytical platforms and create stunning insights. Finance systems would enforce policies and controls with flawless accuracy.
And every single one of them worked in isolation.
For the longest time, I’ve built systems based on what Finance, Ops and other leaders wanted. Each department had a pretty precise set of requirements and for good reasons. The interesting part is by optimizing systems for a particular function I wasn’t solving a fundamental problem for the whole business.
Data in the Real World
When I’m in sales calls, service meetings, and executive briefings (and I spend a lot of time in these rooms), there’s always the same pattern across industries.
- An Operations Leader can see that a shipment is going to be late. Real-time visibility to the warehouse, the carrier, the logistics network. But by the time that visibility reaches someone who can reroute the order or notify the customer or adjust the schedule, the intervention window has closed. The problem is already somebody else’s problem now.
- A Treasurer watches cash positions move in real time. They see liquidity shifting. But they don’t know why. The operational trigger that caused the cash movement hasn’t flowed into visibility yet. They’re reacting to the symptom, not addressing the cause.
- A CFO looks at margin trends. Analytics are screaming that something is wrong. Revenue per transaction is down. Cost of goods is trending up. But the connection between the operational events driving those trends and the financial impact hasn’t been made yet. By the time the connection is clear, the quarter is half over.
Manufacturing. Financial services. Healthcare. Retail. The specific challenges are different, but the underlying problem is identical.
A Better Together Data Strategy
Every application sees its piece of the puzzle clearly. But the business needs to be seeing the important insights from each, ‘together’. The gaps between systems are where margin is leaking. Where opportunities are being missed and risks go unseen. Where executives are forced to make decisions on incomplete information because the complete information isn’t available in real time.
I’m speaking to executives faced with mandates and board-level pressure to realize AI. Competitive threats from companies who figured out how to move faster. Velocity requirements that suddenly made the old ways of operating feel dangerous. All of these reasons and more mean leaders have had to be ready for a change.
They’ve learned to think more wholistically about a data challenge, Chief Data and Analytics Officers (CDAOs) help peers realize the benefits of putting data to good use in more ways. And the ability to connect systems has matured enough to solve the gap problem. So much so in fact, businesses can operate in real-time, intervene before it’s too late and change outcomes.
Most of what I’ve been building up until this point is to help businesses finally address the biggest challenges they face. And I’m excited about it.
The Future of Decision Intelligence
The Instant Intelligence platform was built with knowledge of existing operational, domain specific and analytical systems, provides an operating layer that connects what you already have. It sits alongside your valuable investments to make them feel like one. It makes your existing systems better.
It adds point of inception, up to the last second, real-time visibility of the important decisions to make, right when they need to be made.
See. Know. Intervene.
Simply put, you see what’s happening across your business in real time. You understand what that visibility means in the context of your specific business rules and domain knowledge. You can intervene while outcomes can still be influenced.
I will continue to be in the room where the problems actually live. To listen to leaders. If you feel like you’re one of them, experiencing that same gap in knowing what went wrong and being able to do something about it, we should talk. Not as a vendor. As someone who’s been building enterprise systems for a long time and finally thinks we have the answer.
The real-time enterprise is here. We’ll enable you to become one.