Why Personal “graduated” to TeamData today
Ben Horowitz (bhorowitz) was right after all. He told us a few years ago that our model of user-centric data management was a tough sell for consumers, but that it might work more easily in the enterprise. Realizing we weren’t buying, he sent a nice follow up email to encourage us to seriously consider changing our focus. We were so convinced we were right I’m not even sure if we wrote back (sorry Ben).
Today Personal.com and our Personal Data Cloud solution are becoming TeamData, a reflection of our shift toward solving critical information management and data collaboration needs of companies and their employees, as well as with consultants, vendors and customers.
Enter the enterprise. Despite game-changing transformation from team productivity and collaboration solutions in recent years, employees still have to hack their own standalone solutions to organize the information they constantly need to get stuff done — like spreadsheets, notes apps and even contact cards in their address book. Meanwhile, email, messaging, calls and in-person interruptions remain the standard for requesting and sharing data. Entire classes of jobs continue to exist solely to organize, manage and update information manually for teams and their members.
Most existing solutions for team productivity excel at unstructured data (e.g. files or notes) or messaging and project management. And the few products that understand data, like password managers and digital wallets, are limited in the types of data they manage and their security was not designed for collaboration.
The reality is we’re all still kickin’ it old school when it comes to organizing and sharing information.
Current solutions do not solve the complex challenges of structured, reusable data — which is hard to protect, growing exponentially, changing constantly and needed in super-unique combinations for different lengths of time by people inside and outside of companies.
That’s because data is a related, but altogether different game that requires deep understanding of the data itself combined with granular permissions to enable its reuse in limitless combinations while providing entirely new types of security (e.g. we follow Privacy-by-Design principles).
As we started re-architecting the Personal.com platform and data library for team collaboration six months ago, early adopters started reporting compelling evidence of the benefits. Here is one recent example from Onboardly for content marketing teams:
What’s so special about networked, structured data is that it can be reused over and over across an entire company, and everyone with permission automatically has access to the most up to date version when anyone makes a change (they can also have their access turned off).
There is literally only one copy of the company name, address and Federal Tax ID in a TeamData graph. One instance of the company social media account logins, demo server credentials, and visitor wi-fi. And so on, for over 1,200 different types of data covering thousands of different tasks.
Finally, networked, machine-readable data will also unlock new kinds of innovation when employees and companies grant permission to apps and analytics tools, like the new generation of AI-driven digital assistants.
We are still passionate about our vision to empower consumers with data. We already see employees starting to form teams outside of the office using their private data, and know they will discover whole new ways to use our tools.
For now, we’re excited to keep our heads down and keep solving all the challenges companies and employees face every day. Give it a try and let us know what you think — teamdata.com.
Shane also blogs at rshanegreen.com.
