Tim Berners-Lee said, “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”
He couldn’t have been more right. We know in a world of increasingly scarce resources and increased customer demand. Data is now the key resource that will drive business innovation.
We take this seriously, so we crammed some of our best Datacom software developers into a building for 48 hours with a heap of data and hi-tech gear. What did we get? Nimble innovators solving commercial challenges, and creating a whole lot of very cool ideas. But even more than that, they demonstrated how the use of data and analytics can transform your business.
They were participating in Datacomp – an innovation pressure cooker competition held each year for employees across the business – New Zealand, Australia and Asia. Each year has a technology theme and for 2015 it was about using rich and diverse datasets to create ‘smarter’ answers to real business challenges through machine learning, predictive experiences and automation.
This year’s competition was bigger than ever before, with 130 competitors, 12 teams and three CEO guest judges.
A cross-geographic team from Hamilton, Tauranga, Brisbane and Canberra took away the top prize for the second year in a row after coming up with a solution for predicting and improving milk solid yields for farms both big and small.
In second place was the aptly-named ‘Team Dash’, which created a streamlined, cross-platform delivery system for restaurants.
They used GPS and a smart scheduling system to address three main issues – the slow and/or late delivery of food; driver safety, and managing customer expectations.
Last year’s second-place winners, Konnect, came in third this year with a solution for bridging supply and demand for shipping containers at scale, increasing efficiency, saving cost, and benefiting the environment. The software built during the weekend uses context-awareness and automation on top of shipping data to more efficiently fulfil exporters’ need for empty containers.
‘People’s Choice’ was awarded to an Auckland-based team which created a polished finance application designed to incentivise people to save rather than spend.
Three teams were also given ‘Advance to go’ awards - the go-ahead to further develop their concepts after the weekend was over. Those teams were tackling complex, but potentially viable, problems like insurance fraud detection and accurate project cost estimation.
More important than the awards, though, is the satisfaction our exceptional people get from presenting a working prototype and well thought-out business case at the end of the weekend. Each year Datacomp competitors raise the bar – so bring on 2016.