Founder's Closing Comments

Nizar J. Somji, the Founder and CFO, was the closing speaker for the Matrikon Summit 2007. "It was an amazing conference. I think the quality of the presentations was absolutely remarkable," he said. "At the last conference I pointed out that when people were travelling at the speed of donkeys, you could not go too far out of your way, if you make a wrong turn. But if you are travelling at the speed of a racecar, you can go very far afield when you make a mistake." "We came to the conclusion that there are really individual versions of the truth. It sounded okay, but I just didn't think it fit," he said. There are numerous distractions that keep people from concentrating on their work...and these all have impact on the individual version of the truth. There are silos of data. In addition to this explosion of data operators are inundated with, they create these silos for themselves so they can use information selectively and ignore the rest. Sometimes the information we select may not be completely relevant to what we're doing. Sometimes this selective use of information is used for empire-building in the enterprise. Nizar called this "environmental attention deficit disorder." You are focus constrained, or attention constrained, not time constrained. Your attention span is lost. Technology and the availaility of data have robbed us of our ability to pay attention. "So we created Matrikon Suite, because the Answer to the Universe=42." "We have spent millions of dollars collecting data. I think now we are finally doing something about it. We are able to provide contextual, reliable, globally accessible, non-discriminatory, relevant and ACTIONABLE data." "Unless you actually use the data from reduced variability to lower cost and raise profitability, you are wasting your money. You have to be able to take ACTION." That's where the profits start growing. If our workers' attention spans can be focused, they can find the time for work-life balance. We look forward to seeing you, he finished, at the 20th anniversary of the Summit in 2008.