Designing Visual Systems That Support Data-based Collaboration

I get a lot of calls from technology companies telling me about new products they are developing that would be invaluable to shared services. Certainly, as shared services moves into the analytics space, and as the pressure to drive smarter business decisions and collaboration increases, we’ll need a lot more of this "connecting" or "enabling" capability. One of the big challenges today, bearing in mind the global imperative of "collaboration," is designing systems that allow everyone to look at the same data, capture the status quo, connect the dots, and make the right decisions. Whether you run HR services, or whether it’s Finance and Accounting or any other of the functions that use the shared services model, you're going to want to implement smart workflows, and you want to track and use your analytics. A recent statistic quoted 50% of technology leaders as having implemented a data optimization strategy. That is good news, especially as more than three quarters of those asked believed that they’d reap rewards in terms of deploying analytics applications. So, with all this analytics capability building up, what are we actually doing with the data? As I was mulling these kinds of thoughts, I got a call from a team based in Virginia, which has developed a neat solution for sharing data across the enterprise. It caught my attention because it has its origins in military intelligence (there's nothing like a little military cachet to make us sit up straighter). Launched by a retired Air Force Colonel, Zel Technologies, LLC (ZelTech) has developed a solution called SynerVizion. It’s an out-of-the-box tool that links your technologies, data sources, and applications together so that you can build a user-defined operational picture – or dynamic dashboard of sorts – tailored to your requirements, in just a few clicks. But it’s the visualization that caught my eye, because, after all, it’s how we humans see things, that makes a problem complicated or simple. In just a minute, you can build a desktop visual that accesses original documents from across the system, to build a personalized dashboard that tracks current status. As such, it supports contact management, data analysis, planning, and situational awareness to facilitate decision processes. The software extends the enterprise value of existing IT resources and information for planning, coordination, situational awareness and real time decision support for senior managers and users at all levels within an enterprise. Key government, emergency management and law enforcement officials already have seen great value in SynerVizion as a solution for critical issues faced during Hurricane Sandy. New York State executives and managers recognize the value of organizing, managing and sharing information from stove-piped resources to provide the agility and flexibility to react to changing situations, and save lives by moving injured people to waiting hospital beds through fairly inaccessible road systems. I saw a screenshot of just how they did this: neatly boxed data visuals individually arranged on the fly by the user based on specific tasks or events, opening with hospital names and corresponding bed numbers streamed real time, linking to ambulance routes, and relevant e-mail communication threads. Pretty cool. What's interesting is that you’re not just seeing a representation of the data, but the real-time feeds and original files, which you’re able to manipulate based on access privileges, business rules and security processes. Now, I've never sat behind a shared services leader’s desk, but I figure that somewhere, somehow a product like this would be useful. I can see it working within customer service, by tracking open trouble tickets; it's this kind of intelligent workflow orientation that I think will connect shared services across the world and help them to better impact the business, by enabling real time access to valid data and networked collaboration. The data is there. And we probably all know where to find it. But what teams need today is a kind of "thinking network," the likes of which P&G's Linda Clement-Holmes described to me many years ago in talking about what was then a ground-breaking virtual collaboration approach, called "Workflow." And while some of the more mature organizations have probably implemented either home-grown or bought in solutions to do just this, I would wager there are a lot of you out there that are still struggling to get onto the same page. All of you, I imagine, will be making enterprise collaboration and better networking a goal in the year ahead. NOTE: we are hosting a webinar to help you figure out how to be smarter about driving decisions through your data: click below (or here) to register. [inlinead]

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