Our Mission Has Evolved

Our mission has evolved in a quite interesting direction. But to explain what has changed, let me start with a bit of historical perspective:

EasyMorph began in 2014 with the goal of simplifying data preparation and transformation for less technical people. Back then, it was clear that business users didn't have good tools for preparing, transforming, and automating data, so our mission was to address this omission. The choice of data tools for non-technical business users was (and still largely remains) quite limited - Excel spreadsheets (sometimes with obscure VBA macros), hacky Python scripts, and anemic visual dataprep utilities. At the same time, the data toolkit of people who do nothing but data engineering is prohibitively complex for those who don't (and don't want to) do data engineering for a living. It was obvious that the existing ways of doing things didn't work, so something new was required.

Back then, we re-thought data transformation from scratch with the goal of creating an ideal data preparation tool. We effectively invented a new data transformation paradigm that allowed people outside of the IT department to design data automations that were previously too complex or even impossible with traditional tools. As we added more capabilities and improved performance, EasyMorph started replacing traditional ETL tools in IT departments as well. Today, thanks to its ease of use, versatility, and excellent user experience, EasyMorph makes life easier for thousands of people around the world. Although I still wish more people knew about it. Not just because I'm the founder, but because it's a genuinely great application.

Working on EasyMorph and talking to our customers frequently over many years allowed me to start noticing patterns in the ways people work with business data. Those observations made me realize that teams in organizations lack tools to even organize their work. And despite the seemingly broad choice of enterprise software, there are still no good solutions for that (sorry, SharePoint developers).

As a matter of fact, work in organizations is rarely done by lone individuals. It's usually done by teams. These teams may not necessarily be formal - a group of people from different departments may collaborate on a business task.

The teams have goals - to achieve something, maintain something, or provide a certain function to other parts of the organization. To work on these goals, teams need to regularly access certain information and data, and collaborate on them. This is where problems start manifesting themselves:

Problem #1

First of all, the necessary information and data are usually scattered all over the place - in emails, in SharePoint folders, in shared network directories, in cloud services such as OneDrive or Google Drive, in cloud apps such as Salesforce, in databases and database extracts, in BI dashboards, in chats, and many more.

The current state of things used to be viewed as inevitable evil, because, well, how else can it be?

Just remembering where something is stored is sometimes non-trivial. And when you do remember, retrieving the necessary document, report, or dataset can be problematic since it requires learning how to work with multiple applications and systems, many of which don't bother themselves with being user-friendly.

Is this a business-critical problem? Probably not. Organizations learned to live with the current state of things and have been doing it for ages. Is this a drag on work productivity? Definitely, yes.

Problem #2

The second problem, which might be even more significant than the first, is the lack of a single context for the team. When teams work on a goal, they always operate in a context. The context can largely be divided into two parts. I call them "qualitative" and "quantitative".

The "qualitative" part is the knowledge that is NOT expressed in terms of data and numbers. A few examples of questions answers to which form the qualitative part of a team's context:

• Are we, as a team, doing well?
• What sets us back? What are the pending issues?
• What's our plan?
• Who is working on what? What's in the works right now?
• What can go wrong? Are we doing anything about it?
• What should the team members take into account right now while working on their tasks?

Teams have a lot of actual, contextual knowledge that constantly needs to be communicated between team members because the context constantly changes, and everyone needs to be on the same page. However, teams don't have a single place to keep everyone in the same context. As with everything corporate, parts of the context are scattered all over the place - in emails and chats, in kanban boards, even on sticky notes on the whiteboard in the team's office.

The "quantitative" part of the context is the numerical knowledge, such as metrics, reports, and datasets. As you can imagine, it's also quite dispersed across disconnected Excel reports, BI dashboards, database extracts, business applications, and web portals.

The two parts of a team's operational context work together. One makes far less sense without the other. What's the point in staring at a dashboard if you don't understand the context behind the numbers in it? Numbers going up and down aren’t actionable unless we know what is causing the change, or at least understand the context of that change. And conversely, what's the trustworthiness of your assessment about a pending issue if it can't be backed by some factual numbers?

We at EasyMorph see a lot of value in bringing together these two parts and helping teams collaborate in one context. Because that's how great things happen.

Our evolved mission

Over the past two years, we’ve experimented with various ways of using EasyMorph's technology to organize teamwork. For the 2nd time in our company's history, we attempted to fundamentally rethink the existing status quo, but this time with the focus on creating an ideal single environment for team collaboration. It turned out, EasyMorph is quite well positioned to address the problem.

With that understanding, we now view our mission expanding from "easy data automation for individuals and teams" to "easy work automation for teams that work with data". Importantly, we aren’t pivoting away from what we did previously, but rather expanding our mission's scope. Data automation remains a crucial part of our new, evolved mission, and we remain committed to it. What's new is that we now see data and automation as the foundation for teamwork. Contextual collaboration and data exploration are based on this foundation and aren't possible without it.

EasyMorph Explorer

The extension of our mission has taken the shape of a new product, EasyMorph Explorer, which is in turn an extension of our flagship application, EasyMorph Server (soon to be renamed to EasyMorph Hub). Explorer has been in development for the last two years. During that time, we rethought from scratch how teams work, in particular, with scattered data. We analyzed the shortcomings of the existing tools for teamwork. We validated the concept with a few customers. We settled down on the main design principles and tested the technology. The result looks VERY promising, and Explorer is already in use in a few organizations.

We wanted Explorer to address many of the shortcomings of the existing tools used for collaboration, such as SharePoint or Jira. Our design goals were the following:

• A single collaborative environment for teams with easy access to all the data, documents, apps, and resources they need, no matter where they are physically located
• Combines under one roof the "qualitative" and "quantitative" contextual knowledge the team requires
• Vendor-agnostic and plugs easily into any existing IT landscape
• Designed for use by people with and without strong technical skills

EasyMorph Explorer consists of three components that can be used in various combinations or standalone, depending on the use case:

Real-time collaboration boards

The first component is the Boards - interactive real-time homepages that focus on specific business processes, technological systems, or organizational functions. They are built by stacking up sections of different types and can contain metrics, tasks, goals, links to reports, dashboards, datasets, as well as automation workflows, files, documents, and web apps.

Boards serve as the "starting point" for teams to immediately understand the current context of a specific focus area and to explore it in more detail by continuing to the resources to which the board links.

Boards are not analytical dashboards (although you can add to boards assets such as Power BI dashboards or Tableau workbooks). Instead, they can be viewed as a data and task-oriented replacement for SharePoint sites.

Virtualized interlinked data assets

The second component of the Explorer is the Catalog of data assets. The Catalog is an inventory of all data assets of an organization - such as metrics, reports, database extracts, BI dashboards, ETL pipelines, files and documents, automation workflows, AI algorithms, and web resources. What's important is that the Catalog isn't just a technical metadata reference similar to traditional data catalogs. Instead, users can actually access, retrieve, and operate all these assets right from the Catalog, no matter where these assets are physically located.

From a technical standpoint, the Catalog is a data virtualization technology that abstracts away the technical implementation of assets. Under the hood, most data assets in the Catalog are wrappers around EasyMorph visual workflows (or other programs, such as Python scripts) that retrieve data and files, generate spreadsheets, open webpages, query databases and APIs, and trigger external applications. However, all that complexity is abstracted away from the user who just needs to push a button in the Explorer to retrieve/use the necessary asset. No knowledge is required about which business systems are involved or the technical steps needed to retrieve the data or perform the specific action.

The assets defined in the Catalog can be used on their own, serve as building blocks for Boards (mentioned above), or be attached to issues (explained a bit further).

What makes the Catalog even more useful is that all assets can be interlinked into a single spiderweb of corporate data. Just like you use one web browser to explore the internet, access any website, and follow hyperlinks to go from one site to another regardless of where the sites are physically hosted, you can use the Catalog to navigate from one asset (e.g. customers) to another (e.g. the orders of a customer) while remaining in one application (EasyMorph Explorer) no matter where your corporate data is physically located. Effectively, with the Catalog, you build your own corporate "web of data" and navigate it freely in any direction, within a single UI (user interface). The Boards in this case serve as the starting points of your journey, from which you are able to explore the available data in whatever path makes most sense to you.

Hyper-automated issue tracker

Finally, the third component is the Issues—a highly automated issue tracker and task management app for your team. What makes it different is the tight integration with both the Boards and the Catalog. This integration is game-changing! By attaching individually pre-configured data assets to issues (tasks) programmatically, an issue can be immediately linked to all the necessary corporate data and resources required for issue assessment and taking action on it. In a similar fashion, adding pre-programmed action shortcuts (e.g., “Approve”) issues makes resolutions as fast as a button click. Such a high degree of automation and customization allows bringing work automation to a whole new level, never seen before.

Each of the components on its own is an evolution of already known product concepts, so they may appear initially as nothing new. However, it's their evolution and tight integration that give these product concepts a new quality and capability, previously unseen in enterprise software.

I fully realize that after reading up to this point, you may still struggle to understand what this is all about, and that's absolutely understandable! Nothing like Explorer existed, so it's better to see it once, rather than read a thousand words.

If that sparks your curiosity, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts and would be happy to demonstrate the features and value of Explorer. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, or simply book a demo below (please mention this post in the notes in the booking form):

The new, evolved mission is an exciting turning point in the now 11-year history of our company. I’m grateful to our customers for their financial support of EasyMorph (the company is entirely financed by customer revenue, i.e., 100% bootstrapped) and feedback over all these years. Without you, we won’t be able to keep innovating.

Dmitry Gudkov
Founder