With a muted economic recovery expected next year, including a revival in trade that will only begin to make up this year’s losses, many companies have already begun the “reset” process: re-examining business models, recalibrating measures of value, and devising strategies that stress speed and agility in seizing quicksilver opportunities in a much-changed marketplace.
With adaptability moving to the top of the agenda, access to timely information that lets us see into the workings of our markets is essential.
Commercial intelligence has always conferred an advantage in the marketplace, but with broader access to primary data sources, courtesy of the Web, the competitive edge now goes to those who have superior analytics.
For providers of trade data, that will mean a shift to developing tools that equip organizations to sift, manipulate and interpret data according to their own objectives and abilities.
The traditional challenge of software design, balancing user power versus ease of use, remains. But instead of trying to anticipate the uses of trade data and building applications that get those jobs done, providers will be building basic tools. These tools must be both easy to master and highly versatile. They must equip organizations to create their own complex, indeed idiosyncratic, search queries, perform multi-dimensional analyses and deduce their own strategic solutions from the results they obtain.
The means to create these tools are described in the manifesto. Yes, there is a manifesto, of agile software development: short, successive spurts of fine-tuning and upgrading small, discrete tasks based on actual usage, in contrast to biennial version releases produced on the so-called “waterfall” model.
This is a key reset for the information provider sector: A new focus on creating tools that can readily “fit” the individual hand that wields them, as well as “evolve” along with dynamic market conditions.