If you've watched your share of Star Trek episodes, you've come across an alien species called the Borg. On a search for perfection, they assimilate other species into their own collective "hive mind" and are considered one of the most formidable characters in the Star Trek series. Their greatest strength comes from the vast knowledge of all the cultures they've conquered and assimilated.

Assimilation can be a competitive advantage and differentiator in business as well. Consider the product Waymo has built. Their software is used to autonomously operate vehicles (aka self-driving cars), but because the software is interconnected, it learns from the experiences of every deployment. In other words, if they have 200 cars on the road being driven by their software, whenever one of those cars learns something new about the environment, traffic patterns, etc. all the other cars immediately know that same information. That's an incredible benefit when you think about it. Imagine having a driver of your car with 7 million miles of experience and getting smarter by the second. That's the power of assimilated learning and knowledge.

But how can you tap into such power at your agency? 

There are offline and online methods, but the only enduring solution is a software-based approach. When you think about it, your agency is a collection of individuals doing individual things throughout the day. What they do, what they're capable of doing, what they've done in the past are all valuable data points - as well as the output of their efforts. Bringing that information together can generate important insights for the agency that have impacts on resourcing for projects, costing and profit analysis, capabilities evaluation and so much more. It's the equivalent of having a "hive mind" at the agency that knows everyone, knows what everyone is working on and knows what everyone should be working on for maximum benefit to the agency and client.

That hive mind should be your Agency Management System. But for your AMS to operate as such it must have the capability to assimilate all that information; all of the Project Management data, all of the Accounting data, even all the Media data. It has to assimilate and connect that data in order to generate the insights the agency needs to have a competitive advantage.

Is your Agency Management System up to the task?

If your answer is "well, it doesn't connect everything, but it works.", the question you should be asking is - but does it work? If by "it works" you mean that it generates the basic data you need to keep the agency operating, then perhaps your expectations for what an AMS should do aren't high enough. If your AMS isn't giving you a competitive advantage by delivering revenue-building insights, then does it really work?

You can do better.

As we head into the last quarter of the year, consider setting the agency up for success in 2019 with an AMS that assimilates all your data. A good place to start is an online demo of the AQUA AMS system. It will give you a whole new benchmark of expectations for what an AMS should do for the agency at a price point you'll be hard-pressed to beat. 

The Borg are constantly assimilating other cultures in a never-ending quest for perfection. With the right AMS, your agency can get ever-closer to its own operational perfection.