In business, what if we didn’t have to rely on luck? What if we could be guaranteed to catch that elusive lightning in a bottle time after time, day after day, hour after hour? Would we?

The proverbial lightning in the corporate world is simple. It’s data. More specifically, it’s meaningful data that drives prediction. It’s what helps drive informed business decisions that ultimately reflect on the bottom line…

Most organisations rely on a number of disparate systems and multiple reporting tools to provide meaningful intelligence. Information will occasionally be captured incorrectly, response times to operational requirements can be slow, and reporting can be delayed. Then there’s the time it takes to filter through those disparate sets of information, follow audit trails to solve inefficiencies, and sift through different sets of data, looking for a needle in a haystack to pinpoint your “meaningful data” that will ultimately drive the company’s business objectives.

Data in motion and data that flows is imperative to any organisation, but even more so, is how that data is collated and assimilated – because therein lies both the magic and the solution.

The formula for catching that elusive lightning doesn’t have to rely on luck. It relies on the ability to ensure that the right people get the right information at the right time – every time – and the only way that that can be achieved, is through an effective digital transformation solution.

Whilst there are some impressive and effective digital transformation tools in the marketplace, they are limited in their functionality in that they only address a specific area/functionality within an organisation. More often than not, they don´t solve the problem of disparate information, and when combined, are not guaranteed to deliver meaningful data. Unable to find a single extendable solution in the marketplace to solve this mammoth, complex problem was where my passion project, AFFECTLI was born…

We have spent the past 15 years developing and honing an agile, scalable, and effective digital transformation solution that delivers that magic ingredient: Lightning in a bottle. And while we believed we are ahead of the curve in bringing this product to market, it became even more apparent that this unique solution has – and will become – a critical lifeline to organisations navigating their way through the global covid pandemic which has changed the way we look at systems both now and moving into the future.

Due to the complexities of the problem we were looking to solve, we had to take a number of considerations into account…

First off, we were mindful of the fact that companies were at various stages of their digital transformation process and had already started investing in software and technology, so we had to find a solution that didn’t involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Naturally, this opened the door to another key functionality: Parent-child relationships and custom permission settings to ensure controlled access to information. Taking this one step further, through the application of semantic ontological engines, we set out to design the platform to provide the same functionality that can be applied to everything within an organisation including tasks, people, assets, clients, vendors, tenants and more.

In addition to which, the solution also needed to be system, device and protocol agnostic. Besides the fact that we live in an era of technology that follows us everywhere – be it an executive commuting between meetings, an employee working from the office, or a technician working in a remote location – it had to be a user-friendly platform with the capability of adapting to the needs of each individual because strategic communication and contextual collaboration is another critical component to an organisation’s success.

What followed was the need to tackle the mammoth task of taking into account all the variables around the disparate systems that needed to come together to deliver the desired outcomes. This was the tricky part, because it needed a solution that was easily tailored to suit any environment, and it was of paramount importance that the solution was agile, scalable, and that it used a modern development framework.

Things that we needed to factor into the equation went something like this…