Data You Can Trust: The Impact of a Single Source

If you're not a data-driven organization, frankly, I think you're probably doing something wrong. Data is so powerful and so much a part of our life at this point that businesses need to operate in the same approach. And the only way you can do that is by centralizing your data and cleaning it so that you can analyze it. As someone who used to use disparate systems and Excel files before I came to Rockport, I can tell you that it's just a very rough way to conduct your business.

That's why we ended up inventing Rockport — to centralize all that data, give you clarity in your reporting, one source of truth, and ultimately your entire business in one spot. One of the biggest challenges with cross-department collaboration is the fact that different people are looking at different facts. And when you look at different facts, it's very hard to come to a collective understanding or collective agreement. So, by having one source of truth, you all look at the same information, and we believe that that will lead you to ultimately coming to the same conclusions.

Every fact should have one answer. You shouldn't store that answer in two different places and potentially have two different answers to the same thing where one or the other can get out of sync. Data breadlines is a term that refers to how business users often have to wait a period of time to get an answer to their question when asking their single source of truth. Normally, that's driven by the fact that they don't have enough technical capabilities to query the database themselves, and the systems are not user-friendly enough to allow them to ask in a way that they understand.

As a result, their ability to ask questions gets delayed and it breaks up their train of thought. Well-constructed systems like Rockport allow the business users to ask that question in real time while they use the system, thereby allowing them to get a lot deeper, a lot faster. We jokingly like to call it weaponizing your data — whereby having one central source of truth in your large enterprise especially, you can create an enormous data source that you can query for intelligence and insight, and large organizations can often be an amazing data provider to themselves if it's properly organized.

Fannie Mae has done an admirable job of collecting its data, cleaning it, organizing it, and preparing it for its own use. As a result, it's really impressive the analytics that they can pull out and the workflow efficiencies that they get. Business scalability ultimately relies upon the fact that you can use analytics and computer capabilities, not just brute strength using humans. Unfortunately, especially with Excel, people rely on people to do a lot of work that computers can do, and people are far more expensive than computers.