Optimization Made Easy

2019 was an exciting year for me, in September I founded LITIC BV together with my partners Johannes Bisschop and Robert Schwarz. It was a big decision, leaving analytics consulting and becoming an analytics entrepreneur, but I’m glad that I took the step. Still lots to learn about entrepreneurship (yes, read Eric Ries and Verne Harnish), very excited about what we plan to achieve. We’re on our way for 4 months now and close to our first official release, the desktop version of the #LITIC #Explicator, a free version of our software. We have been busy talking to clients and friends of LITIC, discussing LITIC’s capabilities and learning from their first impressions of our software, which are positive. In their opinion, it is well designed, fast, complete, easy to use, intuitive and visually appealing. They also think that the functionality offered in LITIC is well aligned with the current best practices and needs in practical problem solving and solution development. It is exactly what we aim for: to provide decision analytics software that supports solving a business problem as easy as using a spreadsheet.

In our view, problem solving is a process consisting of the 3 major steps, Design, Build and Deploy. In the Design phase the focus is on understanding the problem, why solving it is important and envisioning how it can be solved using an analytics approach. In the Build phase, prototype solutions are created using an iterative, test and learn approach. In the Deploy phase the selected prototype solution is productised and deployed, usually following an agile product development approach. Of the three steps the last step, Deploy, generates the most value from a problem owner perspective. The other two steps, the Design and Build phase, only generated limited value. They should therefore be kept as short as possible, but not shorter than necessary.

How to keep the Design and Build phase short? In these steps normally a lot of time is spent on data ingestion, coding & debugging of candidate solutions and the visualization of model outcomes. All are necessary, however with software that supports you to work iteratively, supporting easy data ingestion from various data sources and fast data visualisation a lot of time can be saved. Moreover, if the software also allows you to create and validate multiple candidate decision models and share insights from these models with prototype end user apps without the need for coding, even more time can be saved. LITIC offers that kind support, allowing you to solve a business problem up to ten times faster than using traditional approaches. It frees up scarce analytics resources tied up in non-value adding (coding) activities. The freed up time can be used to increase the quality of the candidate solution, in the end generating more business value.

It doesn’t stop here. When a solution to the business problem is available, deployment of that solution should be as easy as sharing an Excel workbook. There should be no need to start all over again and recreate the model and user interface for release on a production environment, again spending scare analytics and IT resources on coding, debugging, etc. LITIC has strong deployment facilities, including the creation and deployment of web services and interactive web apps, allowing for a speed up of the deployment phase as well.

In summary, LITIC supports you by taking away technical distractions allowing you to focus on the problem, come up with better ideas to solve it, turn those ideas into models and deliver those to end users in a fast, incremental way, delivering precisely what is required to solve problem.

Back to our journey. Looking forward, 2020 will be very important for us. The release of our free desktop version of the Explicator will be our first mile stone. A sneak preview can be found here. I’m very excited about it and can’t wait to hear what you think of it. Next, we will release the cloud version of the Explicator and add exciting new functionality, more on that later. In 2020 we will continue to make optimisation easy for you, as easy as using a spreadsheet. Be sure to check our website www.litic.com or our company page on LinkedIn where we will post the announcement of the release of the free LITIC Explicator Desktop version in the next couple of weeks, including online learning environment, links to how-to-material, and our user community. For now 2019 was great, 2020 hopefully even better. All the best to all of you!