The life of the international advisor sounds pretty glamorous. Jetting from country to country, spending time with high profile people, shaping economic policy and improving national business climates, as well as the strategy of individual firms.

But in reality, it’s about hours and hours traveling between economically depressed places, hoping for a room with a working shower, and praying for the ability to function despite constant time-zone changes. Days are filled with client meetings, presentations, and other work related activities. And at the end of the day, when the ideal thing would be to collapse on a clean hotel bed with room service and laptop to crunch data and prepare presentations for tomorrow’s round of meetings, the pleasure of our company is usually required at a dinner meeting with clients.

The biggest challenge we face is time.

And the biggest challenge our clients face is data—current, reliable global data that allows them to understand what is happening in their world. What are customers buying? What are competitors doing? How satisfied are employees? Are partners the right choice for a real winning strategy? It’s only by understanding the current landscape that decision makers can answer the question “Where do I go from here?”

The problem is this: the high-expertise human talent required
to gather and analyze this data is very expensive. And it takes a lot of time to accomplish this.

Developing OTF Insight…..

We wanted to be able to offer our clients something different than an overpriced consulting experience. We wanted to allow our expensive human resources to focus their efforts on gleaning real insights from data.

We realized that we needed a product that would allow us to gather real data from the market, quickly and easily, and to have that tool working overtime for us while we focused on working with clients to create real results. We surveyed the market (pun intended) and came up short. Some products had great surveying capabilities, but no analysis. Others allowed you to do everything—if you purchased several separate modules and had a resident tech geek who could make them all work seamlessly together.

So we bit the bullet—and we built our own tool that could offer everything that our advisors needed in projects. A flexible interface, that is both desktop and web-based, makes access flexible for our globetrotters. It allows users to create a survey, publish effortlessly over the web, with responses rolling in while we do other work. And when all the results are in, the automatic analysis feature saves us amazing amounts of time spent massaging data, and produces graphs that can be brought directly into presentations and reports.

Somewhere along the line, we realized that people other than ourselves could use this product. And here we are—offering OTF’s Insight to the world. Ask, Analyze, Act!