The Vertical Integration of Knowledge

Vertical integration typically refers to the degree to which an organization owns (or controls) its own suppliers and/or consumers of its products or services.  The more vertically integrated an organization, the more of the value chain they control.  There are benefits to vertical integration including the ability to more closely match supply and demand, thus better controlling pricing and reducing uncertainty.  Detriments include more difficulty changing to suppliers who may offer competing raw materials at lower costs.

Vertical integration of knowledge, the way I’m defining it, similarly refers to the degree to which an organization obtains facts about their marketplace, and the extent of the value chain that was used to derive that knowledge.  Vertical integration of knowledge doesn’t require owning or controlling companies either upstream or downstream; it simply requires an agreement to collect data from organizations up or down the value chain.

For example, the company Above The Treeline collects sales data from independent booksellers and makes that information available to publishers, distributors, reviewers and librarians across the country.  While the purpose of the company was originally to help independent booksellers analyze their own sales and compare their sales to industry averages, the company now also provides vertically integrated knowledge (and collects revenue from providing that value) to:

• book distributors, who previously could only track sales only until booksellers bought books for their stock, and
• publishers, who previously could only track sales until distributors bought books.

Think of how the knowledge now available to these two groups can help them better manage their own businesses.  Now they can see when books were bought, if they were bought in specific combinations, how sales and incentives impact sales performance, and explore a variety of other factors.

At Dataspace we’re not only technologists, we’re strategists.  Talk to us about the data you have available (either from your systems or up/down the value chain), and we’ll work with you to integrate it, format it, and turn it into a strategic asset.  Who knows – you may even be able to sell it.

How can you use the concept of the vertical integration of knowledge to benefit your business?

The best analysis puts you in control

It’s a great feeling helping a client understand their data and working with them to analyze it to get to an ‘a-ha’ moment.  Since Dataspace’s founding 15 years ago, our leaders have seen pretty much every technology that helps us help our clients.  And until recently, our CEO would comment, “they’re all pretty much the same.”  Well, he’s got a different set of talking points now.

You may have seen a few of our posts on the merits of QlikView, and now I’m proud to announce we’re Michigan’s newest QlikView partner.  Let me tell you why I’m excited.  Trite as it sounds, QlikView really is different.  Well, maybe it’s not QlikView that’s different, maybe it’s that using QlikView is a completely different experience than using other leading BI tools.  I’m not talking about features, technical architecture,  enterprise deployability or things like that – I’m talking about how, at the most basic level, using QlikView is different, and here’s how I sum it up: QlikView allows analyses that follow the way your brain thinks, not the way the data is organized.

With traditional tools you get some data, format it a certain way, and then use some kind of analysis and reporting tool to view it different ways.  If you find that you missed something, you need to go back and get more data.  If you find you have the right data, but it’s not formatted so the tool is optimized, you need to reformat it.  All this means that to use the tool, the user must bow to the data.  It makes free-thinking difficult, because if you find you want to look at the data a new way, you need to jump through hoops to get the tool to do what you want it to.  Even worse, if you need to rely on IT to reextract and reorganize the data every time you want another analysis, good luck making friends with them.

With QlikView and its database structure, you load all the data at once.  You don’t have to create cubes or other views on which to perform your reporting and analyses – QlikView’s application lets you drill down, up, sideways, it doesn’t matter – it’s all there from the start.  So, if you’re investigating which products are most profitable, and realize it would be great to see which customers buy those products, with one click they’re identified.  Want to see which products one of those customers buys?  One click to reset the products and one click to select the customer, and all the information updates again.  No more cubes, no more incremental fetches, no more bowing to the way the data is structured, no more IT SOWs.

Let your BI tool help you uncover the facts as your brain dictates.  Give QlikView a once-over.  Contact us if you’d like to discuss further.