"Own the Data" Trademark Renewal: The Content in the Message
On December 7, 2020, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted SNA's application for trademark renewal for the phrase "Own the Data." As with most companies, SNA Software, in coming up with the phrase to boil down the value of its offerings, sought something pithy that would convey its core message to the market. So what does it convey or does it need any elaboration?
"Own the Data" means several things to people in the information management world, and to specific technical domains, particularly in the area of project, program and portfolio management, inclusive lately of the subdomain known as Program Planning & Control, or PP&C.
Disrupting the world of Proprietary Data
The world of information consists of a lot of data that is collected as a result of performing work and registering progress. Much of this data is collected ad hoc, such as through Excel workbooks. In other cases, it is collected through end-point, hard-coded niche solutions designed to perform one function in a domain that consists of many functions. In this environment, each application acts as a barrier to effective information use, where each stream of data requires proper association, integration, and contextualization in order to derive significance. The barrier is that almost all of this data is built in proprietary structures.
Throughout the initial decades of digitization leading up to the present, proprietary data structures meant that your data was essentially owned by the publisher of the software. Some software companies even went so far as to insert language into their licensing agreements to forbid the extraction of data from their data structures.
This is the world that "Own the Data" disrupts.
The Customer Owns the Data
"Own the Data" explicitly asserts that the customer owns their data. SNA Software brings this about by turning virtually any data source into open data and, in cases of periodic data, into flat files and industry schemas that accurately capture the originating source at 100% accuracy. SNA does this through a COTS data extract, transformation, and load capability (in the software industry known as ETL) that saves hundreds of thousands of dollars in each instance of import customization.
Taking this concept one step further, SNA Software adapts its visualization, analytical, and application configuration framework to allow our customer subject matter experts to determine how to receive and apply analytics and integration to the data, converting it into information and deriving timely knowledge that can applied both tactically and strategically to assist in business success.
You own your data. Make the most of it with SNA Software.