Last Updated on: 4th March 2024, 02:51 pm
Many enterprises with excellent B2B and B2C portfolios struggle with inadequate internal database management tools, affecting web content, sales records, timesheets, and beyond. In the worst cases, this can erode employee productivity and spirit. Sodium Skies, a software consultancy based in London, proposes what they believe to be a refined solution.
Guy Strelitz, the founder of Sodium Skies, elucidates, “It’s not that companies are doing the wrong thing. 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.”
The question arises: can the Simple Data System truly live up to its promise?
Strelitz offers insight: “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.”
The Simple Data System, engineered by Sodium Skies from the foundation up, caters specifically to the requisites of data managers. It boasts a streamlined interface, uniform and predictable form structures, an easily accessible edit history for robust audit trails, and in-built role-based access controls, transferring user management authority to managers and reducing dependence on developer or IT support teams.
Integration with existing databases is designed to be straightforward. Upon initial integration, Simple Data System surveys the database schema, simplifying the form creation process. “Getting it that smooth took a lot of effort and some trickery behind the scenes,” Strelitz concedes.
On the subjects of security and the risk of vendor lock-in, Strelitz clarifies: “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.”
As for lock-in concerns, Strelitz reassures, “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!”
Strelitz believes that Simple Data System represents a more economical option for businesses compared to the development and maintenance of bespoke internal tools, suggesting significant potential savings.
The proposition from Sodium Skies is clear: better functionality for less money, potentially leading to a future of lesser grievances and greater productivity.
