August 21, 2023
Have you ever thought of Google Maps as the world’s most widely used data-driven decision-making tool? And did you know that large businesses account for 39% of GDP in OECD countries? This perspective and fact explains why Ardoq has the same potential as Google Maps, when it was launched in 2005.
Let’s answer the easy part first: Why should we care about what Ardoq does?
Ardoq is on a mission to organise the decision-critical information within the world's enterprises and aid their digital transformation processes. Everybody has felt how larger systems struggle with sub-optimal decision-making and even the slightest improvement within the ∼5000 $1billion+ companies in OCED has an immense impact on value creation. Assuming better decisions in these firms lead to a 1% increased gross value-add, one additional entire Norwegian welfare state could be funded each year.
The Mercator Projection: Maps are the basis for common understanding of the current state, they provide the basis for decision-making as well as the necessary canvas for designing the future. The Mercator projection depicted above is the most commonly used projection and famously makes Europe and North America much bigger than they really are. The Mercator projection became wide-spread because it helped you find the shortest way (rhumb line) across oceans using a flat map.
Throughout history, cartographers have been superstars. Mercator with his ingenious projection for rhumb line navigation purposes is perhaps the most famous one: He allowed the world's merchant fleet to make better decisions when sailing the trade routes. But maps are not only about how to navigate the existing world. They are also about defining the perception of reality and designing the future. The most intriguing - and grotesque - example of this is how the African map was redefined following the Berlin Conference organised by Otto von Bismarck in 1884.
Now to the tricky question: How will Ardoq deliver its value?
Today, our maps have been brought to life. When you pull up Google Maps, you're most likely about to make a decision; you wonder how to best come from where you are to a desired location. Within seconds, Maps gives you different alternatives; car, bike, bus or walk. All of the alternatives display time spent, pros- and cons, and factor in any traffic jams, or tells you how busy the central station is. A few seconds later, you have made your choice. The decision you made is probably better than if you had travelled the same route hundreds of times over years, compared six different public transport time tables and had personally accumulated experience of traffic patterns. But your live map does even more: Once you arrive at your destination, you know which café to enter, having checked the reviews and seen a photo of their sandwich.
Within your enterprise, your maps are not only dead, they are often times non-existent. You may find an org-chart in your HR-system. You can get revenue streams from SAP, or if you are lucky in a PowerBI dashboard. Your strategic goals are in PowerPoint, your high-level value chain is in Visio, and your IT-infrastructure is available in ServiceNow. Applying the analogy of Google Maps, you have no tool that combines the data-points above and gives you different routes to different goals. But even more concerning, you may not even have updated maps at all.
Without a good map, you can not model the future. If you are planning to build your own house, Otovo uses map data to instantly calculate if you should get solar panels or not. Spacemaker uses map data to calculate the most efficient way to set up buildings for real-estate developers. But who helps you make these types of decisions within the enterprise? Today, the answer is: consultants. And once today's decision has been made and you need to make a decision about tomorrow, you need to hire them to map out everything once again. Not only is this expensive, it is also the least inclusive and least democratised way of making corporate decisions.
Even within the large enterprises, things are changing. As also the most traditional and security-concerned companies are moving to the cloud at rapid pace, data capture becomes standardised, and standardised equals scalable. Pulling data from AWS, Azure and ServiceNow is like feeding satellite data into Ardoq. Additionally, integrating your ERP or HR-system is like sending out the Google Maps Car to get the Street View level of detail.
Now, Ardoq's trick is to make the above data interesting by combining it with user-fed information from a nifty feature called Surveys. Ardoq organises how people contribute towards this through "broadcasts," which send out the surveys. The combined data is stored on your Ardoq enterprise graph. Why would you care about updating your information on the graph? Well, have you ever heard about the café that survived without being listed on Google Maps? Once decisions are being made based on the graph, you cannot afford to be an outdated entity on the map.
Do you remember when Google Maps opened up their APIs? Probably not, because they opened up their APIs just a few months after the product was launched in 2005. These APIs allowed developers to create "Map mashups" - the hottest thing at the time. By combining data, a mashup helped a niche group of users find specific information for their particular use case. At the other end of the scale, businesses like Uber were eventually made possible because of the Google Maps APIs. They had successfully nurtured an ecosystem.
Similar to the developers making Google Mashups based on APIs, we see partners such as Nualis in Amsterdam using Ardoq's APIs to make custom-made dashboards for C-level decision makers. We see big-four consultancies using Ardoq to map out organisations, and we have the Norwegian startup AXAZchallenging the entire digital transformation delivery model by using Ardoq's graph. On the other side of the globe, and on the other end of the scale, the mixed reality startup UpRoom! in Hong Kong experimenting with presenting the Ardoq Enterprise Graph in 3D for making strategic and operational decisions.
Currently we are seeing an ecosystem emerge around Ardoq, that may very well impact our economies to the extent I implied at the beginning of this article. Once Ardoq is not only a data aggregator, but also a data provider for a myriad of specialised enterprise-grade AI-driven decision-making tools, Ardoq's impact will come to show and we are well en-route.
Did you make it to the end? Then you deserve to learn why you will never hear about Ardoq being used: Most people have absolutely no clue of what is going on within large enterprises - that includes their CEOs. Until Ardoq is everywhere you will see it nowhere.
(Written by Marius Koestler, November 2021. First published on LinkedIn.)
