Data As A Service

Sam Westbrook

I read an article recently about an idea that is an extension of a business concept known as SaaS (for Software as a Service). In SaaS a software company leases out its software to other companies. In DaaS (Data as a Service) one company collects data and provides it to other companies for their use.

9G Enterprises is into DaaS. Starting with our Chamber of Commerce surveys, we’ve built up our ability to work with customers to determine what type of data they need to better understand where opportunities and problems are hiding. The surveys can be internally focused—the Employee Satisfaction Questionnaire—or externally focused—the Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire. Surveys are administered over the internet or via paper forms (or both ways). Managers and supervisors have access to results in easy-to-digest formats through secure internet nodes.

Effective companies are data driven, so signing up for a DaaS program or having some other way of collecting critical data is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient step.

Have data, will what?

Our Board Retreat-in-a-Box initiative is one way to proceed. For organizations that are comfortable with their planning processes, the Board Retreat in a Box gives them the results of their organization-specific survey broken down into issue areas, outlines the steps required to get from the data to action items, and even supplies suggested best practices. We’re happy to help you get through your first retreat if you think you need us, but we’ve found that most organizations can do a very credible job by themselves or with a local facilitator.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from one of my earlier newsletter articles. Does this sound like you?

“Our quarterly results showed a worrying trend: Flat revenues with a decreasing profit margin. This had happened before, and we knew just what to do. We got the executive steering committee together at a two day retreat and went through a complete vision, goals, strategy, and tactics development process. In short, we reinvented the company. We put our best efforts into an email that went to everyone in the headquarters as well as to all of our field offices. We did an editorial board session with the Wall Street Journal to hype our new direction with the investment community.

“And almost nothing happened: Revenues still flat; profits still eroding; and increasingly hostile stakeholders. Where’d we go wrong? We convened some focus groups at our field offices to see what the rank-and-file thought. Mid-level managers and line employees were either unaware of the changes in direction or were aware and were hostile toward them. We explained that we were all in this boat together and that we were just trying to do what was best for all of us.

“ ‘Then why,’ asked one employee, ‘didn’t you include employees who were actually carrying out the procedures currently in place and might have some good ideas about how to change them? And didn’t you realize that the company’s email system was so overused for unimportant reminders of routine deadlines that nobody bothered to actually read any of the stuff that was posted? Important stuff came by word-of-mouth.’ ”

To go from data to positive results you have to have PC: no, not Political Correctness. In this case the PC that is needed is Participation and Communication. People at each level in an organization are the experts on those items they are responsible for executing each day. Executives have the big picture (vision and strategy) and don’t concern themselves much with process and procedure (tactics), which are the purview of the lower echelons.

If you are a relatively small organization you could probably gather everyone at a central forum and get them all involved in mining the data, which would also take care of a big part of communicating where the ensuing initiatives came from. Since most organizations can’t afford to totally shut down, the compromise is to take a selection of people from each level in the organization and use them in the process. The participants can keep the rest of the organization up to speed on what is being considered and why certain decisions are made: in short, they function as both subject area experts and as valued sources of information about what has happened. They can help build a bow wave of support for the new ideas and procedures and spread the word to every corner of the organization.

The environment in which organizations must function doesn’t stay static, so organizations must learn to continually adapt to the changes that impact them. Using DaaS is one way to keep the data current. Sharing the data with people from all levels of the organization and soliciting ideas for change as part of an on-going improvement process is how top notch organizations stay that way.