Wouldn’t it be easier to do business if people knew what they were talking about?

One of the biggest challenges in business is that companies don’t know what they’re talking about – literally. Key business metrics, business terms, data definitions and how to translate data and information from one system to another are vaguely understood, or understood in too many ways. Business data and facts are named obscurely, or redundantly, or with imprecision, or are really just “collections” of data spliced together instead of one clear input. As a business grows, changes, acquires and divests operations, numerous opportunities appear to impact your business data in a detrimental way:

  • Business processes and/or information systems get put into isolated silos
  • Confusion arises over data ownership and maintenance responsibility
  • Data definitions get mangled in translation from one system to another
  • Mergers and acquisitions occur and company systems seem impossible to integrate
  • Quick and dirty ‘fixes’ are accomplished, but become permanent undocumented workarounds
  • Data errors are introduced through repetitive entry at many points in the business

And after a while, your staff needs to remember the “logic” that is embedded in data fields to work with the data correctly or you need a translation dictionary to remember that “this” kind of data goes into “that” field. All of these important pieces of corporate memory are everywhere: in notebooks and on office white boards, on the ubiquitous yellow stick note ‘cheat sheets’, in the heads of a few key knowledge workers, and certainly not documented in a consolidated and standard way. In the biblical story of the Tower of Babble at least those building it realized that they were not able to communicate!

Business processes become hostage to the disintegration. They slow down. Errors increase and groups dedicated to fixing them are formed.   The situation comes to a point where executives that need to use the data to plan and make decisions don’t really trust it. “Personal data marts” start appearing and multiplying until there exists no single version of the truth.

So Who Gets the most benefit from working with MetaView360 and how do we solve these issues?

Our ideal client – the one that gains the most benefit from working with us – is a Fortune 1000 company that has legacy systems or has been very acquisitive and has numerous systems still in place from the acquisitions. They want to have faith in their data and information systems but currently do not. There is a high likelihood of “tribal” knowledge being required in order to be successful. There is likely a long ramp-up time for new employees because they need to come to understand the peculiarities of the systems. If you are seeing post-it notes all over everyone’s computer in the departments that are heavy data users or data inputters, then we should probably talk. You can have data that is understandable, manageable and correct. And Metaview360 can help, just like we have helped many others.