Make work less tedious and more interesting

A combination of off-the-shelf databases, APIs that connect to data, and a web/mobile based front-end, running on cloud platforms like Azure, Sharepoint or Amazon Web Services can easily take your current processes, make them faster, scalable, accurate and most importantly cheaper and less clunky – giving you what you need to do your job, faster, better and cheaper.

For example, you can build simple dashboards to query your data using Microsoft’s Power BI, instead of asking some analyst to spend hours poring over custodian reports and spreadsheets. Having your data available on the cloud allows you to access and collaborate from anywhere in the world. You can reduce the scope for errors by having your data centralized in a database instead of multiple spreadsheets.

You can also utilize platforms created by a crop of innovative startups that can transform how you look at your business – you can use Kensho to perform historical regressions beautifully visualized in a few minutes, or you can use Narrative Science to automatically write your market commentary. You can visualize your analysis in beautiful slides using Prezi or Pellucid.

this is not just a matter of cost-saving or time-saving, its a new way of doing business. And its happening now.

Recently, the Atlantic ran a story on how a small team of developers rescued Healthcare.gov after its initial fiasco. The article profiled “Marketplace Lite”, a group of developers who work as a startup within the government and replaced contractor made apps for the broken healthcare.gov platform at one fiftieth the cost. Yes, 1/50th – that is not a typo.

Similar scales can be achieved in invest-tech. Marketplace Lite shifted from in-house systems to Amazon Web Services, getting greater computing power, storage and reliability at a fraction of the cost. They created functional apps in an agile manner, cutting down on the need for large staff of business analysts and project managers.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or any of its affiliates. The author may be associated as an investor or as an advisor with certain companies mentioned in this article.