Patricia Alfheim
July 12, 2024

Embracing complexity - and using it to be faster, better and smarter

Embracing complexity - and using it to be faster, better and smarter

Complexity is a common challenge for enterprises across industries. There are more apps, systems, software, tools that we can imagine while the burden of legacy systems and data silos continues to grow.

We constantly find new tools to make us work faster and more efficiently, but often we end up slowing down as we try to manage them all and the data they create and duplicate.

Complexity is a constant reality for enterprises - and it’s not going anywhere. 

Unfortunately, it also carries an inherent risk if ignored - contributing to painful consequences such as product or project failure, being unable to meet compliance or regulatory requirements and ultimately being less competitive in the market. 

Put simply, complexity slows us down and affects both bottom line costs as well as top line value creation.  

This isn’t something that can be solved instantly or easily -  but perhaps within the challenge there is an opportunity. 

At the data level, complexity is a core challenge towards making data accessible, usable and valuable within an organization. This is compounded by consent, data sharing rights and security issues. However, if enterprises can embrace this challenge, the complexity of the data can actually be valuable in and of itself. Core to solving this is leveraging modern tooling (yes more tooling - but the right kind of tooling), that is designed to simplify and even leverage complexity - rather than contribute to it. 

Graph based tools map data in a way that embraces data relationships, connections and metadata, allowing you to align and unify data across your business, query it for insights and curate high quality data products. Leveraging this ‘connected’ data view can unlock opportunities to drive value across the business. 

While this is commonly thought of in terms of analytics and recommendation or personalization models, the opportunity is far greater. Data captured by a single application, can also be valuable to another. Data updated in one application can impact decision logic in another (like access decisions). Data captured from multiple systems holistically shows a very different picture than a single application can give. This approach to data provides a much needed holistic view, but that alone is not enough to drive value. The data needs to be available, usable and trustworthy. This is where complexity becomes valuable and enables you to move faster and build smarter.

The better we can capture, connect and control data, the easier we can enable the business with quality, trustworthy and relevant data to drive business decisions, product builds and design much better customer experiences - without compromising on security or data privacy.  

A simple adjustment in thinking and tooling, can make data complexity a strength, rather than a liability – saving you time while creating value. 

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