72. Indigo Technologies- The Power of Data Analytics with KOM Analytics

In this episode of Raising Tech, host Amber Bardon welcomes Tammy Torkleson, founder of Indigo Technology, to discuss the power of data analytics for senior living. Tammy shares how her platform, KOM Analytics, transforms data management by giving small and mid-sized companies the sophistication of enterprise-level solutions. They explore shifting from data gatherers to data consumers and the importance of creating a culture of trust and efficiency.

They also address the fear of change and reveal how automation can revolutionize decision-making, improve quality of life, and simplify compliance. Don’t miss this insightful conversation on maximizing your data's potential!

You can email Tammy (ttorkleson@indigotulsa.com) or visit their website for more information. 

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Transcript

Amber Bardon: Welcome Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon, and today our guest is Tammy Torkleson. Tammy is the founder of Indigo Technology, and she has made a career of monetizing information. She's going to tell us a little bit more about her platform, which is called KOM Analytics. But what KOM Analytics does is it provides the power and sophistication of an enterprise data warehouse and data science solution for small and mid sized companies.

So Tammy, welcome to the podcast. 

Tammy Torkleson: Thank you. It's a pleasure. I'm so glad to be here. 

Amber Bardon: So data analytics, BI, all of these are hot terms that we're hearing all the time. And we're always looking for more vendors that we can introduce our clients to or is getting asked about these types of systems. So I'm really glad you're here and we can learn a little bit more about KOM.

So to start off with, tell me a little bit about your background. Where did you come from? And tell me a little bit more about how you found Indigo technology. [00:01:00] 

Tammy Torkleson: Yes. So I have actually made a career out of data and data monetization, even before it was really sexy to talk about data.

So going all the way back to the nineties, I am a self taught database architect, which is an odd thing to be, but it is a thing. And so way back in the day I started out working in data and that graduated over the years to me, working with a lot of different companies and industries and landing in the advertising space. It was really monetizing and figuring out how to monetize all of that content, all that data that we had behind the scenes. And that got me into working with just large volumes of information and figuring out how to make money out of that. I founded Indigo Technology in January 7th of 2016, and it was really all about creating a data business for health care. And we really were looking at

healthcare tech and healthcare informatics was really starting to grow. It had been around for a [00:02:00] long time, but it was finally starting to gain traction where people started to understand this is important. started out working with major hospital systems and we're very successful in doing so. And they're still our clients today. But what we really found is that in that small to mid tier market, there's nothing.

So we really started working with how do we get all of the things that we're doing for these big, major healthcare systems Christ down to a model that doesn't lose any quality, but yet gives them all of the flexibility that they need just because they need to be able to grow and have access to the same kind of information.

So that's what we did. And so we created a product KOM analytics and we created it so that we would maximize scale by leveraging all of the technology that we're using in a big massive data warehouse. We just compressed it down to where now it can be used in a cost effective way. We've been trying it [00:03:00] out for about the past three years.

And it's been super successful. We would be working with the CEO at a hospital and he'd say, hey, a friend of mine runs a senior living community and what you're doing for us is great.

We'd really like you to talk to them. We call it transforming you from being a data gatherer to a data consumer. So instead of you spending all of your time gathering information and consolidating it and copying and pasting it and putting it on a whiteboard so that people can see it to where they're actually logging into these dashboards and they're consuming the data in ways that they were never able to before.

Amber Bardon: So I'm curious. You didn't have a background in health care at all. So you came from a very different industry. So what motivated you to start doing data analytics first in hospitals? And then how did that lead to see your living? 

Tammy Torkleson: I started out doing accounting information, right?

So accounting information in the airline industry. I moved into oil and gas. And so I transitioned from airline data to energy data. And then I transitioned to advertising data. And quite [00:04:00] frankly, data is data.

Data has customers, it has persons or companies. There's commonalities in the way that data is structured. It's just transactional information. So Kevin, my business partner, had created an identity resolution platform.

So that's a fancy way of saying when you've got a big, fancy data warehouse, you want to know that this person is the same person in this system that's over here, that's over here. And it resolves all the duplicates and it combines them and says this Tammy Torkelson that spelled incorrectly is the same as that Tammy Torkelson that spelled right.

And he had done that with 2 of the major healthcare systems here in Tulsa. That was that transition into healthcare.

Amber Bardon: Okay, that makes sense.

You're right data is data. And I think that definitely healthcare and senior living has been a little bit behind when it comes to learning how to use that data use it well and to use it to make decisions. 

Explain to us as if I was a new prospective client, how would you sell me on KOM? 

Tammy Torkleson: Data 

is the currency for [00:05:00] decisions. So if you're not getting good data, you're not making good decisions. You cannot make good decisions. And so leveraging data and leveraging your information is as valuable to you as hiring your next VP of healthcare.

 So when come into an organization, we're like, you're spending a lot of money capturing information. You have your sales system. You have your E. M. R. You have your financial system. You have your engagement system for your residents, for example, in a senior living community. And what you're looking at is you're putting all this information in and you've got to have a way not just to get it out, but to get it out in a useful way.

And so we come in and we're like, we just ingest it. You don't care how we ingest it. You don't care if it takes reports. You don't care if I've got an A. P. I. Because at the end of the day, as long as you can get access to that information on your fingertips on your phone on your P. C. [00:06:00] And in an email when there's an alert, you just need that information to make decisions, and we enable that to happen.

And so instead of us Making a big deal about how we do it. We just get it done and we prove it. And what we do is we create trust and we create visibility. Every single customer we've ever worked with, every client we've ever worked with, the very first time we start showing them information in a dashboard, they're like, this isn't right.

And we're like, okay let's explore it. Let's see what's wrong about it. And almost 100 percent of the time it is right. They've never seen it raw before. They've seen it in somebody's put it into an Excel spreadsheet. They've manipulated it in 14 different ways so that it looks the way that they think they want to see it, but what they really need

is the raw data in context with other information. It has to be in context. And so all of a sudden, it's Oh I didn't realize it was taking [00:07:00] us, three weeks to get this data cleaned up enough for me to see it on my report. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah, and I think one of the big challenges is, everything you said is something I'm saying to clients all the time about the systems they have and how they use the information.

But we also still see a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of things not in the system. So how do you address that through through your software? And what should a client do to prepare to use a tool like KOM if they're, still doing a lot of things manually or in spreadsheets? 

Tammy Torkleson: The really good thing about it is when we come in, we do what's called a data assessment.

So we sit down with the team all the department heads, all the executive team. And we say what is one thing that you would call a win? What's a win for you? That's how we do the implementation is we go through and we say, okay, here are the wins that we need. Let's prioritize those.

What's going to be the biggest win for the most people? And let's go there. And so once you get a win for someone, you establish trust. And [00:08:00] then once they trust it, they're more apt to use it. And they're less likely to start like this Excel spreadsheet on the side because they trust that because they touched it.

So it's by, it's through actual Trust, it's actual usage and that because we're a data company that's on the scale of data maturity, right? So we're actually teaching them data maturity little bits at a time. We're like, we don't want to create chaos. I don't want to disrupt all of your processes.

Keep your Excel spreadsheets until you're ready to trust that this is easier for you. And then, and it always happens. It always, eventually they're like, okay, I'm not using my Excel spreadsheet anymore. Okay. And then they're encouraging the next person. No really, you should try this. It's really working.

I'm not like spending my weekend. Copying and pasting data out of these 3 reports so that I can get information and it's quality of life and it's getting your weekends back and it's the director of health care [00:09:00] actually walking around on the floor and interacting with residents and interacting with employees and interacting and seeing firsthand how things are doing instead of being stuck in their office doing spreadsheets.

Amber Bardon: It's so funny. I have a story I always tell. So I go on site to a lot of different communities all the time. I'm interviewing stakeholders and it's a recurring theme that I'll meet with the finance group. And a lot of our clients are using older financial software that maybe doesn't even have the capability to do a lot of the things that they want to automate.

So they're using a lot of spreadsheets. And so it's funny because I'll ask them, what are your technology challenges? And they'll give me like a long list of complaints about, I've got a spreadsheet and this is manual, this and that. And I said what if you could switch your accounting system to something that would automate all of that?

And they always say no. And it's so funny because of that fear that you're talking about, where people have to actually change what they're doing. Cause they're so used to doing it manually, even though it's also a huge complaint. So I think that is something just like a mindset. And we talk a lot about technology culture, but how do we change that mindset and that technology [00:10:00] culture to, Have people start thinking in this way, because if they want to get to be able to fully utilize a product like KOM, they're going to have to get there.

 So let's talk a little bit about the mindset of a data consumer versus a data gatherer. And how do we facilitate that shift? 

Tammy Torkleson: A data gatherer takes great pride in their gathering. We all know all of the people in the organization that this is, Fred or Judy and they are masters at Excel, right? They can do anything with Excel. That is an identity, right? When we find out who those people are, we actually want to encourage them to come to us first. We're like, rather than you be the excel master, wouldn't you like to be the data master? Wouldn't you like to be the person that everybody still comes to? But you're the one that's able to answer those questions quickly and you can answer more of them faster.

And so we just literally start chipping away at. Okay. Here's an easier way for you to do what you've always done. We don't want you [00:11:00] to change what you've always done, per se. We just want you to get faster, better at it. And so that is how we like little bits at a time. Look, we can give this to you.

We can automate it. Like we can make this information show up on this one place. Instead of you having to log into the financial system, log into the payroll system, log into the HR system. How about what if you just logged into one place? And you can see all that information together and they're like, I can do that.

I'm like, yeah, you can do that. We can make that happen for you. And so then once we show them and we then go very detailed into the data behind that, like it's sometimes it's summary data and sometimes it's drill down where you get into the little details, but we have them validate that data. And once they trust it and say, yep, yeah, this is the same data I'm working with, then they have the capacity.

And the really cool thing, the thing that we love is they'll call us and say, hey, we think there's a problem. we've had this big anomaly, this big shift, and we don't know about it. And [00:12:00] we don't understand it. And so we'll start digging in and somebody fat fingered a number and it's got an extra zero on it.

And they're like, Oh my gosh, I never would have known that. I would have been, I would have spent weeks figuring that out at month end close, for example. And then those people start talking and those people will become a champion of data. And that is slowly how you change that culture.

And you go from being that data gatherer to truly a data consumer, and it just it happens piece by piece, bit by bit, usually it starts in finance because they're usually the ones that, we usually bring the financial systems on board first, but usually health care is right behind them because they're hard.

And there's so much compliancy automating fall reports. Change your life. We can automate a fall report and we can integrate that directly with. Do you have to submit that to the state? You have to submit that to CMS. Who do you have to submit this to? We can package it all up, show it to you. [00:13:00] You can confirm it and off it goes.

Amber Bardon: Let's 

talk a little bit more about that integration. I'm sure everything you're describing sounds like a real dream to have all your data and information in one place. But I know that something that comes up a lot is how do we bring all that data together. So I know there's a lot of different terms.

There's FTP uploads, there's APIs, there's data relays. Can you talk a little bit about what are the differences between those tools and then how does KOM bring those tools together? 

Tammy Torkleson: Yeah, interoperability is the term, and that just means that information gets shared between applications.

And in the early days, we didn't have all the tools we have today. back in the day, that really just meant, everybody's probably heard of something called an API, which is just really the digital exchange of information between two systems and two systems that are really tightly coupled, meaning first names is F.

I. R. S. T. N. A. M. E. And this system, but it's F name over here, and we have to map those together and make them the same. We call that the legacy way of doing things, because that's how it all started today. We now have Microsoft fabric is a good [00:14:00] example. Inside of Microsoft cloud services, it is.

Which is all we use. We are just, we are a hundred percent Microsoft shop. We've bought into the, to the crazy. And here we are, but we're leveraging all of those new tools. So Microsoft has of course, AI, right? In a HIPAA based environment, I can feed it an Excel spreadsheet. I can feed it a PDF or a receipt or any number of things. And it's going to extract all of that text and allow me to group and organize that in more traditional ways and feed it into our data warehouse.

So we are a software company by nature. So we built software leveraging those tools inside of a Microsoft HIPAA environment that's closed. So we're not training any kind of AI models in weird ways. We're training it only on the data inside that closed environment, and we're able to leverage those tools and do things better, more accurately and faster and less [00:15:00] expensively than we could five years ago.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, it makes sense. I feel like this terminology just changes so quickly and it keeps improving. And I think it's important for people to understand what these differences are and what the limitations are.

So let's talk a little bit about if a client Wants to get started, what is the implementation timeframe? What do they have to do to prepare? What would someone need to know if this is something they're interested in moving forward with? 

Tammy Torkleson: So for us, we start with that data assessment. So we call it the data assessment period, and it lasts for about one to two weeks.

And we literally have a team of people, usually it's two or three different people that will come physically on site. We think it's important to meet face-to-face and be present so that we can, at a, it's good to meet them and we're trying to establish trust from the very beginning. So it's meeting with them and asking them, what are your challenges?

What is, what are the things that keep you up at night? What are the things that you have to, fight with every day from a data perspective or an application perspective? What are things you are hoping you could do, but you [00:16:00] just don't have time. And then quite frankly, what would be your win?

What is the one thing that if you could solve that problem, it would make your life easier. And we sit down with them. We take 30 minute sessions. So we're just sitting with them for 30 minutes. Much like this. We're recording it so that we're transcribing it behind the scenes so we can be present and ask good questions.

And then we take all of that information. And in that 1 to 2 week period of time, we're creating an executive report and that says we met with all these various different people. These are all of the things that they mentioned to us. Here's their wins. Here's their biggest challenges and pain points.

And we present it to the executive team. And then we walk through. How do you want us to prioritize next steps? And that is when we do the implementation plan. And so that's the next piece. And the implementation plan usually takes anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks. For weeks for us to start pulling in that first system.

And so we truly can get you up and running. Sometimes [00:17:00] it's as quick as 2 weeks. Sometimes it takes 4 to 6, depending on the vendor and vendors don't oftentimes like us. Because we challenge them and ask them questions.

The sages of the 

world, and I know I'm not, I'm not saying anything poor about sage, but if they've never worked with a company like ours, they're like, sometimes it takes a little bit of time to get through the, We're not trying to move them away from you or anything else.

We're just trying to maximize the information that we can get out of this application. So once we get to the ingesting of information, that usually takes about a week to two weeks.

And then you're up and running and we're iterating everything. And the great thing about our system, because we are leveraging more traditional data warehousing technologies on the backside, we have what's called a staging area, right? So we can pull data in, we can look at it, we can play with it.

We can manipulate it, and then we can present it to the dashboards and let you see it as the [00:18:00] consumer. And you get to say, yes, that's right. Or no, that's not right. And if it's not right, we can blow it all the way and do it again. We can iterate that over and over again until we get it right. And that's very fast.

And so getting to that right, then we move it into our reporting tables. And those are, again, very traditional looking. If you were to look in the database, they'd look very traditionally. But you just connect your data sources to it and they're pretty flat.

So it means that over time, our goal is we don't want you to have us be your data scientists forever. We want to teach you and coach you so that eventually you're doing your own reports. You're connecting to those data sources and you're looking at insights in ways that you haven't done before. So that's really the process.

So start to finish. It usually takes between 6 and 8 weeks for us to go from assessment all the way to where you've got an actual product and you're consuming data from at least usually a couple of systems. Sometimes we're able to get 3 systems up in that period of time. 

Amber Bardon: There has been an [00:19:00] influx of companies entering the senior living space or doing something similar.

So tell me a little bit about what's different about KOM from other products out there. 

Tammy Torkleson: So what makes us unique is you have the best of both worlds. You have that concierge, Custom consultative group to work with because we're very much one on one and we're creating, think of it the sales force of data analytics, right?

And sales force, you can customize and you can do all kinds of fun things and you make it very much look like you and that is where we are unique in that we are creating an environment that is your environment and it can look very much like your organization. And. Even though behind the scenes, things are very structured and they're plug and play on the front side of it.

The way that we use power bi and all of these various different front end tools, we can customize it to where it looks just like your organization. You don't want this [00:20:00] financial data on this dashboard. Great. You don't have to have it there. We can put it over here on this dashboard. So what we do is we create for example, Power BI. We're going to create the Power BI infrastructure inside of their organization.

It's not on our side. So we're the guests. And that's theirs, and that Active Directory that they already have set up. leverages all of the tools, like 365 that they already have. So we're leveraging all of that and wanting them to get to that data maturity and data, Awareness that they move beyond sometimes even what we imagine that they could do.

So that is where we're different. We're definitely, that concierge style, but we're very heavily involved in the beginning and we're an advocate for them with their vendors.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, I think that's a really important differentiator . I've seen a couple of our clients where they've actually tried to build this themselves, and that has not gone very well.

 I've seen them have to hire a team of developers and try to do the Power [00:21:00] BI, and that doesn't go well, but on the other hand, you don't want to be paying a consultant a ton of money either, like you're saying, so it's got like this nice middle ground, which I think is really great. 

Tammy Torkleson: Yes.

And the way that we price it is that way as well. In the early days, we have what we call our fully managed service and that fully managed service is it's obviously a lot more expensive than the pay as you go, but the expectation is that in the early days, it's still the cost of a business analyst.

So you're getting all of this and you tell us jump and we say how high. And so we're there for you and we're supporting you in a very real and very integrated way. But as you get better, you can drop down to different service tiers where you're just paying for the licensing of the platform.

And then that becomes like an intern cost. So the expectation is you start up here, but then you work your way down, but it makes you so much more powerful. You can negotiate vendor contracts with much more power, so there's all kinds of different benefits. [00:22:00] I think that come out of it over time.

Amber Bardon: Tammy, I've really enjoyed learning more about KOM. I've heard about it from a couple different places. So really excited that you were able to join us on the podcast today. Where can our listeners find out more about you? 

Tammy Torkleson: My email is T Torkelson at IndigoTulsa. com. So that's T O R K L E S O N at Indigo, I N D I G O Tulsa. com. Or you can go to KOM, K O M analytics. com and that's our website. 

Amber Bardon: And we'll definitely list those in the show notes as well for anybody who was trying to write that down.

Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Tammy Torkleson: Thank you, Amber. And it was great to meet you as well. 

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Riesig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

[00:23:00] As always, thank you for listening.

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Riesig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.