Data is everywhere, even before the advent of technology and the digitalisation of business processes. Data plays a significant role in the decision-making process. That is why it is important for data to be accurate and at the same time also provides detailed and general overviews to support decision-making and actions by various management levels in an organisation.

The right information to the right person at the right time

But according to Vikram Mengi, Co-Founder and CEO of Latize, utilising data is difficult for your average day-to-day user. This is mainly because data comes from many different systems and sources – both manual and digital, structured and unstructured.

Data could come from manually inputted information, or automatically captured digital movements. It could come from well-structured spreadsheets or a thousand email messages. Basically, there is no easy way to get a 360-degree view of information you need in just a single platform.

“Everyone is focused on technology and not so much on the data itself.”
-Vikram Mengi

Digitisation efforts will not be fruitful if organisations do not focus on data management. However, working with data is a niche, usually done by highly-skilled individuals who focus more on the technology of managing data (such as AI and automation) than making use of the data itself. In other words, too much time and resources are spent on collecting and making sure data is usable, that organisations lack both to fully utilise said data.

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But for Latize, this is a problem that they aim to solve for organisations. “Business users should be able to access whatever data they need, when they need it, without jumping through hoops,” Vikram said. And managing data is just one of those; you also need to provide business users with the tools that enable them to use the data that you’re delivering to them.

Intelligence. Quantified.

When Vikram and his co-founder, Biju K., first incorporated Latize in 2009 after years of working on information and digital technology, they realised that there are are technologies that handled structured data very well, technologies that handled unstructured data very well, but nothing with the real capability to handle both.

Through Ulysses, their revolutionary data management platform that intelligently and automatically links data across different formats and systems to form an intelligent web of information, Latize enables users to easily capture, harmonise, and utilise data sets.

How does it work?

First, they capture all bulk and incremental data from a variety of sources both structured and unstructured. An important next step is the transformation of the captured data; Ulysses automatically links these data semantically by relationships or logical classification, cutting through the traditional schema boundaries and information silos that would otherwise have required significant system integration efforts to overcome.

Once data has been captured and transformed, users can now easily access it through a self-discovery browsing system with an integrated 360-degree view that lets them identify links and native relationships between data attributes to derive actionable insights.

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This seemingly complicated process is performed automatically by Ulysses, and the linked data is presented in a visually comprehensible manner that is easy to navigate and therefore lessens dependency on IT personnel for ad-hoc data requests, which in turn means more time analysing data instead of preparing it.

Vikram gives as an example how Ulysses works in improving conversion and customer engagement in the Insurance industry. Because of the complexity of Insurance IT systems, companies have a fragmented view of their customers – customer information are usually categorised or siloed on a per policy basis – that makes it difficult to accurately up- or cross-sell. When campaigns are based on very broad target customer segments, naturally the conversion rates will suffer.

Ulysses transforms these data silos into a knowledge base that continuously learns and delivers a 360-degree customer view without the need to build or define any dashboard. Using models based on statistical methods and algorithms, Ulysses can deliver a personalised offer for each customer in a campaign, which can churn out higher conversion rates.

This process can be used across different industries and functions using various data points, such as financial and technical policy compliance, insights on public safety, and educational solutions, among other things.

For a truly connected world, machines must be able to dynamically interact with each other.

Latize believes that there should be no need for manual human intervention or highly specialised knowledge for data to be accessible. According to Vikram, it is their vision to have an environment where business users are instantly connected to a knowledge base that they can interact with and where data is intelligent. But market adoption is a long way to go; even in Singapore, the market needs to evolve to be truly data driven. For that to happen, tech adoption for both vendor and consumer has to increase.

Expanding from mostly government clients to private enterprises, Latize is continuously developing their product – they have launched Latize Spark Labs to fuel innovative app development around Ulysses – and gaining access to various industries.

Onward to the vision of being a truly connected world.

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Disclosure: This article is produced by the e27 content marketing team, sponsored by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore.

Featured image credit: everythingpossible / 123RF Stock Photo