A beacon in the fog of information overload: Software replaces cumbersome, outdated reporting

by Bruce Gillespie

Until a year ago, Tom Walworth, president of market research company Statistical Surveys Inc., of Grand Rapids, Mich., was serving his clients by routinely sending out sales figures about the recreational vehicle, marine and manufactured housing industries in a cumbersome printed document. Not only was the arrangement costing his company a small fortune in postage to ship to customers across the United States, but the information was never as current as he would have liked.

At the same time, Mr. Walworth says, his customers urged him to put his company's market research data into a simple spreadsheet format to make it easier to use and analyze.

Those concerns set him searching for software that would provide his customers with the analytical tools they wanted while delivering information in a cheaper and more useful electronic format.

It was a tall order, but Mr. Walworth eventually found what he was looking for in Databeacon Collaboration Edition.

Developed by Web reporting and data analysis company Databeacon Inc. of Ottawa, Databeacon Collaboration Edition software allows Statistical Surveys to disseminate new data to its clients in minutes, if not seconds, over the Internet, eliminating the need to mail out printed reports. "Basically, as soon as the data is updated in our system, we post it into Databeacon, and [clients] have it immediately," Mr. Walworth says.

The software also gives clients enormous flexibility in their ability to view and analyze the data with just a few simple clicks of a mouse.

"The software has made a person whose job is 15% or 20% analyzing markets as effective as a full-time person analyzing data," Mr. Walworth says.

This is music to the ears of Andy Coutts, chief executive of Databeacon Inc., who says the idea behind Databeacon Collaboration Edition, launched in March, was to enable a wide range of users to analyze and share among themselves pieces of information from a central database without having to rely on analysts or information technology professionals to do the work for them.

"It's very difficult if you're going through a centralized IT function to have your needs fully met," Mr. Coutts says. "Using IT resources is expensive both in terms of the cost of doing it that way, but also the latency between the time when you form the question and when you're able to answer it. What we've been able to do is say, if I have a piece of information I think is relevant and want to share with a peer, I can share it in a form where they can not just view it, but they can create their own reports from it."

Using Databeacon Collaboration Edition, users create reports using data stored in a central database, which they access via the Web. They can then e-mail those reports to colleagues, who may choose to analyze or manipulate the data in different ways to create new reports.

They can do all this without altering the original, since the reports are essentially just instructions for the computer on how to call up and present statistics in the central database. The benefit of such a system is that as new information is introduced into the database, each saved report is updated automatically with the most current data.

Having consistently up-to-date information available for all users is a major benefit, Mr. Coutts says. "Everybody starts singing from the same song sheet as opposed to doing a lot of what they do today, which is show up at a meeting and I've got my spreadsheet and you've got yours and your numbers are different, and we wonder why," he says. "Tying people into the work group fosters better use of the information that's sitting in databases, and it ensures a higher level of consistency among the people using it."

The software was built on a publishing model and is licensed per processor instead of per user, which makes it affordable for large companies who anticipate having many users, Mr. Coutts says. "Being a publishing architecture, where we're sending information down to the [user's] browser and people are using the client horsepower for the mechanics of analysis and reporting, the number of processors you need to support that audience is far fewer than with previous-generation technologies."

Databeacon Collaboration Edition was also designed to be simple to use -- there is no training or even a manual available -- so it can be easily rolled out to new users. A short Flash presentation on the company's Web site explains how the software works.

Mr. Walworth says he and his staff found the software very easy to learn. "I have a [marketer] who is 60 years old and he's not a strong computer person, but he's able to use this software and even demo it, which is a tribute to the fact that it's very user-friendly."

Mr. Walworth says one concern he has is how to maintain control of his database and keep clients from sharing it with companies who are not clients. "We just tell our customers, if you decide to pass this to another company, you've just paid for their marketing. That usually works."