Simatree is an advisory practice that brings established solutions to other organizations intending to integrate and educate the people, culture, technology, and processes of other organizations to optimize the use and capitalization of complicated and unclear data. Simatree harnesses the strengths of exceptional people to help develop the business and build effective solutions. The unique and personalized approach covers all industries and company sizes and allows the clients to recognize and capitalize on the value of their data assets.
Simatree is building a technology ecosystem of partners that allows operating at all levels of the tech stack and across all industries
The team at Simatree has been working in data, analytics, and change management for over 20 years and has knowledge about the market and understands the trends. “There are two converging trends where we saw an opportunity to emerge; first, there is a push by organizations to do more with data irrespective of their size. As a result, companies are creating leadership positions such as Chief Data Officers and forming a team to capture value from data. Secondly, the data industry’s response to this demand was technology and tools, but leveraging the value from data is not a technology problem, it is an organizational problem. Most organizations have tools to manage and analyze their data. Instead, they lack the right people to utilize the data to business need, the right processes to get data-driven challenges from decision-makers, and the right leadership to use data to drive and transform organizations,” reveals Patrick McCreesh, Co-Founder of Simatree. He further added, “It was the convergence of demand and misaligned leadership where Simatree saw an opportunity to provide something else – a real leadership and people-driven strategy for leveraging data and analytics.”
The people at Simatree believe that staying ahead of the curve is about culture. There is no way to mitigate uncertainty, except to keep a broad perspective on the development and delivery of services. Simatree is doing this in two key ways. First, the team at Simatree collaborates relentlessly and partners with a variety of technology partners and remains agnostic from any single solution to provide the clients with the right solution and allow their recommendations to evolve with emerging trends. Secondly, Simatree drives for general problem-solving in the employees. As Simatree doesn’t want complete specialists, they hire curious Swiss Army Knives who can solve problems in a variety of ways with a variety of tools. Simatree believes that adaptability is built into the DNA, and that is how they will lead in an evolving marketplace. Simatree would rather be the leaders of a $100 M ecosystem than the sole owner of a $5 M company, which will add more value to Simatree and their clients.
The biggest unforeseen challenge in driving analytics solutions is change management. Central to this is the assumption that the analytics solutions provided by the company will be used and accepted by people. Simatree’s entire strategy is, therefore, based on understanding the end-user and then designing, communicating, training, and promoting the use of analytics solutions.
Analytical tools have proliferated in the marketplace. It is not just business intelligence software, but over the last ten years, the whole stack of data analytics products has expanded dramatically. “I foresee one of two things happening in this space- consolidation or specialization. Some tools are certainly better for certain industries, but a lot of tools have duplicative capabilities. Some players build from the data to visualization; some start with visualization. All of them provide some value, but it doesn’t seem like this expansion of data and analytics products can continue forever. It will be interesting to watch where the consolidation happens,” reveals McCreesh.
On a current engagement, Simatree is supporting an organization that is designing its Chief Data Officer role and team. Simatree is helping the organization to define the characters and the structure of the team as well as providing assistance to design the data and implementing the architecture for the organization. Moreover, Simatree is supporting the migration of the data from on-premise solutions to the cloud and simultaneously working with the business units to develop analytics use cases and provide data to decision-makers. In short, Simatree is helping the organization to build a full approach to data and analytics.
Simatree is building a technology ecosystem of partners that allows operating at all levels of the tech stack and across all industries. Simatree may go more in-depth with few partners and receive certifications or become implementation partners and may go lighter with other partners and maintain loose relationships. Either way, it is about expanding that ecosystem to maintain a reliable, relevant, and growing business.
Simatree currently has offices in New York and Washington, DC, and has operations in Dallas. Simatree would like to build out their Dallas presence and add another office in Boston. The expansion will follow the key markets – financial services, insurance, health care, and the public sector.
The Simatree team supports organizations as they develop their purpose-driven approach to analytics. Simatree believes that effective data and analytics programs start with a strong purpose for the use of data that yields a strategy for data and analytics. Simatree helps organizations develop this purpose and strategy and then works with organizations throughout the transition journey to execute that strategy. Simatree tailors its solutions to suit the client’s needs, regardless of the industry or sector of their client.
