Collaborative intelligence for businesses

The business landscape has changed significantly over the past decade and is bound to change faster in the future. However, the way businesses review and make critical decisions is largely still driven by excel reports, dashboards and presentations.

With the proliferation of so many digital tools that’s available at disposal, one expects that majority of decisions are driven by data. However that is not the reality in most cases. The underlying reason for this is simple — delivering the right insight to the right people at the right time is a hard problem.

At Scape, we are building a collaborative insight delivery platform that serves two purposes:

1. Consolidate insights about the business from data
2. Communicate, align on decisions made and actions to be taken

We deeply believe these should be tightly coupled outcomes. It should take the shortest time to iterate between the two.

There are two approaches that businesses currently take: On one hand, Excel reports, business intelligence tools and dashboards are used — sticking together a bunch of charts for the business users in the hope that it will be consumed and acted upon. The truth is that most of the dashboards eventually end up dead because of inaction or the underlying context has changed over time.

Other end of the spectrum is PowerPoint presentation/Google Slides — which helps in building rosy narratives and getting people on the same page. Slides work really well for cases where the interaction is one to many. However, in most cases in business, where critical decisions have to be made, the interaction needs to be many to many. Slides, by design has a bias towards the most persuasive input rather than the most honest/valuable input.

Data & charts are not useful without business context

With the explosion of SaaS products out there — CRM, marketing automation, social engagement, prospecting, revenue intelligence, customer success, billing etc. a small company typically uses about 20 different systems to capture information - each specializing in running/automating a particular business process. Data teams perform multiple rounds of data cleansing, rule based manipulation, model building, and visualization to arrive at insights and decisions. Due to this long decision making cycle, business teams typically lose the opportunity to make incremental changes to their actions and iterate using data. If data is oil, the business context is the spark that it needs for the insight to come to fruition. For a insight delivery layer to be effective, the fundamental design criteria is to bring relevant information in the right visual format to where the business context is being discussed.

Asynchronization is required for decision making

Important decisions are currently concentrated on a few key meetings such as monthly and quarterly reviews. For making this meeting work — an entire army of analysts, business folks, data engineers, leadership members are summoned. They throw data from multiple directions to support their view of the problem. However more often than not, one of these four things result

1. everyone describes their narrative, the elephant-in-the room gets missed
2. data is inadequate to provide a compelling argument, meetings get pushed
3. a decision is taken with limited / without information

everyone describes their narrative of the elephant, the full picture gets missed

Therefore it becomes critical to make the decision making process more asynchronous than being discrete. This way the probability of wrong decisions will be reduced through quicker iterations and visibility at all levels.

Standardization of metrics and model definitions

Asynchronous decision making means that there is a single source of business truth and alignment of metric definitions by default. Naturally this means less rework and more clarity for data and business teams in presenting their course of action. This serves as a platform for executives and leadership to debate, brainstorm ideas productively.

Collaboration and Visibility of decisions

Breaking down silos between teams is critical to leverage synergies. For that you need people who plan and execute on the same platform and get them up to speed with the right context in the least amount of time. Whether it be documenting the interactions happening around a particular decision or discussions that leads to a new insight — the solution should help others in the team promptly gain that knowledge without having extra meetings.

The decisions made at different points in time should be captured in real time so that the teams can time travel to a point when a particular decision was made and state of the metrics at that time. Seeing across time helps in identifying those experiments which have give significant result so that the favorable ones can be scaled accordingly.