LONDON, UK. March 4th, 2024 - Sometimes companies with fantastic B2B or B2C products and services also have shocking internal-facing tools to manage their databases: web content, sales data, timesheets and more. At its worst it can sap your employees' productivity and morale. London software consultancy Sodium Skies think they have a solution.
"It's not that companies are doing the wrong thing." explains founder Guy Strelitz. "When you're in business, particularly as a small business, your attention is on your revenue source. That means your end users, your paying customers. But you probably have another user group too: your internal users – data managers or content managers. You just don't have the time or the budget to put the same effort into research and design for the tools for the internal users that you do for the product for the end users. So the data managers tend to end up with whatever the developers put together as they were developing the end product. It creates disappointing outcomes for them and often for the broader business. And it really feels like there should be an off-the-shelf solution for the data anyway. That's where Simple Data System comes in."
Simple Data System. Can it really do what it says on the tin?
Strelitz explains: "We've flipped the script a little. By making your database content management our business model, we're able to give you that high quality usability and design that otherwise falls through the gaps."
Sodium Skies say they've built Simple Data System from the ground up to meet the the data managers' needs. So it has a clean design that's easy to navigate, with very consistent and predictable forms. A visible history for data edits pulls double duty as a highly visible audit trail. It's a powerful deterrent to anyone doing something silly with your data in the first place. And built-in role-based access control puts adding and removing users into managers' hands – no more tedious calls to the developers or tickets to IT support.
How much work does it take to set this up? When you first connect Simple Data System to your database it scans the schema [the structure of tables and data]. So when you want to create forms for a table, the system already knows most of the details; finishing the job shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. "Getting it that smooth took a lot of effort and some trickery behind the scenes." says Strelitz.
Addressing the two elephants in the room – security and supplier lock-in – Strelitz adds: "Keeping our clients' data secure has been a key consideration from the start. It's a multi-layered challenge, from architecture decisions to dependency monitoring, and from server configuration to penetration testing [security testing]. It's much more than a legal requirement. If we were responsible for a client data breach we'd be out of business, and rightly so."
And Lock-in? "There's no lock-in at all. We're not interested in that game – we stand by the value we provide. If you decide to stop using Simple Data System, all the data you've published through it is already yours. You can turn us off as easily as you can turn us on!"
In fact Strelitz is convinced it's a cheaper solution for companies than building their own content management system. "How much does it cost your software team to build an unsatisfactory tool for the internal users? 20% of their overall project time? That could easily be tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds. And how much does it cost to run it? Just two developer days a month is incredibly expensive, even if it's easy to overlook because they're already on payroll."
That's a bold claim from Sodium Skies: better tools at a lower cost. If they're right, maybe that's a little less pain and a little more productivity for us all.
"It's not that companies are doing the wrong thing." explains founder Guy Strelitz. "When you're in business, particularly as a small business, your attention is on your revenue source. That means your end users, your paying customers. But you probably have another user group too: your internal users – data managers or content managers. You just don't have the time or the budget to put the same effort into research and design for the tools for the internal users that you do for the product for the end users. So the data managers tend to end up with whatever the developers put together as they were developing the end product. It creates disappointing outcomes for them and often for the broader business. And it really feels like there should be an off-the-shelf solution for the data anyway. That's where Simple Data System comes in."
Simple Data System. Can it really do what it says on the tin?
Strelitz explains: "We've flipped the script a little. By making your database content management our business model, we're able to give you that high quality usability and design that otherwise falls through the gaps."
Sodium Skies say they've built Simple Data System from the ground up to meet the the data managers' needs. So it has a clean design that's easy to navigate, with very consistent and predictable forms. A visible history for data edits pulls double duty as a highly visible audit trail. It's a powerful deterrent to anyone doing something silly with your data in the first place. And built-in role-based access control puts adding and removing users into managers' hands – no more tedious calls to the developers or tickets to IT support.
How much work does it take to set this up? When you first connect Simple Data System to your database it scans the schema [the structure of tables and data]. So when you want to create forms for a table, the system already knows most of the details; finishing the job shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. "Getting it that smooth took a lot of effort and some trickery behind the scenes." says Strelitz.
Addressing the two elephants in the room – security and supplier lock-in – Strelitz adds: "Keeping our clients' data secure has been a key consideration from the start. It's a multi-layered challenge, from architecture decisions to dependency monitoring, and from server configuration to penetration testing [security testing]. It's much more than a legal requirement. If we were responsible for a client data breach we'd be out of business, and rightly so."
And Lock-in? "There's no lock-in at all. We're not interested in that game – we stand by the value we provide. If you decide to stop using Simple Data System, all the data you've published through it is already yours. You can turn us off as easily as you can turn us on!"
In fact Strelitz is convinced it's a cheaper solution for companies than building their own content management system. "How much does it cost your software team to build an unsatisfactory tool for the internal users? 20% of their overall project time? That could easily be tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds. And how much does it cost to run it? Just two developer days a month is incredibly expensive, even if it's easy to overlook because they're already on payroll."
That's a bold claim from Sodium Skies: better tools at a lower cost. If they're right, maybe that's a little less pain and a little more productivity for us all.
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