Why Synapse Intelligence

Organizations have a knowledge problem. We know it. They know it. They try to solve it mainly by either implementing a learning management system or better yet, a knowledge management system. My personal experiences have indicated that these systems are not doing a good enough job. Even people inside the organization feel like those solutions are not doing a good enough job.

I had a couple of experiences with the employees of a company being clueless. The first was an experience with Nabil bank. We use Corporate Pay offered by them and we had to add a new user. First we opened the admin portal and added another user - didn't work. Then we called the bank, they said they'd enable it from their end - didn't work. Then we called them again, then they asked us to write an email requesting for user addition - didn't work. Then we called them again, and they said that we have to fill out a form and submit it in the nearest branch. Talk about efficiency.

The second experience was again with a bank. This time I had to create a new account in Prabhu bank for payroll (on a side note - such a terrible practice, the gov should put some regulation against firms forcing even consultants to open a new account in a bank of their choice to save NPR 10 + VAT). This was a "filler" account which I planned to close immediately after my work with that firm was done, so I didn't want any of their cards, cheques, etc. The customer service staff there said that they're running an offer where people who create accounts in the current 3 month period will get their mobile banking, sms banking and some other things for free for a year. I asked them twice, is it for just 3 months or for a whole year for customers in this 3 month period?. They said for a whole year - wrong again.

The third experience was with the municipal office/water dept. Most staff there were clueless, they sent me to the wrong office multiple times. The staff in the ward office didn't even know under which heading should the book the amount I paid for installation. Quite funny.

Synapse intelligence was something I imagined even before these experience. Anyways, we started building "Enterprise Intelligence".

Our idea of bringing all data (policies, manuals, SOPs, emails, regulatory docs, notices, structured data from internal systems, etc.) into a single place, indexing it, making it searchable and adding access control did not close the loop. Data would be stale the next day if the data lifecycle was not captured. We needed to capture the data/document lifecycle.

Enter workflows.

Workflows model any arbitrary process in an organization. It can capture all data, documents and other information. Closing this loop had an interesting side effect - Synapse Intelligence was not just a knowledge platform, it was a process automation platform as well. Synapse Intelligence entered the territory of a meta-software that in effect could solve tool sprawl for various workflows and internal processes.

Explaining what Synapse Intelligence to people is still difficult though, or perhaps I just suck at it. Each person who explains Synapse back to me has a different interpretation - but that's good cause I never have to correct them. Synapse Intelligence can be what they think they want it to be. It can be a knowledge platform, a document management system, a workflow automation system, a business process modelling system, a meta ERP, an internal chatbot, an internal agent management and execution runtime, an external chat bot, internal communication platform, and more.

I've been thinking even more lately about this. I used to hate the word "IT" for being such a catch all term people use to refer to both software engineers and people who fix printers (a lot of respect to people who manage printers - not an easy job unironically). I preferred "software" instead. But now when I think of all software, it is just sharing information and communicating things. All systems are either information systems or communication systems. All things are IT. Synapse Intelligence is IT.