When we worked in the corporate world we worked with people and their thinking. We captured their words verbatim and then studiously analysed the words for context, repetition, emotion. phrases etc. We literally stuck the data to the walls of our office and had a multitude of highlighter colours to colour code the insights.

It wasn’t long before the data outgrew the office and we had to look at another way. A key employee at the time had computer programming skills that were not being used. Well make lemonade when you have lemons. We loaded all our textual data onto a database and began to analyse the data in a multitude of ways. We reduced the processing time from days to literally minutes. Our on-line data analysis tool set was born. But like a new born baby we didn’t really know what we had given birth to in terms of what is was to become.

Fast forward 6 years and we were building data structures, back ends, front ends and interfaces for clients who had data in multiple places, paper being a popular location, and did nothing with it to gain advantage in their business.

One of our great successes was reducing the work completion to invoice cycle from four weeks to 24 hours. The new target being developed was “invoice as we leave the workplace”.

So what is this wee blog about? Well lets have a look at the insights.

  1. It is likely you are perfecting inappropriate and inefficient processes.
  2. You have people in your organisation who’s skills are not being used.
  3. A new internal process could become a revenue earning external process.
  4. You never know what the new “child” will emerge into.
  5. Oh and your data has value if you handle it well.