Article by Steph Anderson, COO, Todata Analytics
When I was Chief People Officer at Meridian Clinical Research, we had more data than ever and far less clarity about what it meant. Our systems didn’t talk to each other. Reporting cycles were slow, and confirming what leaders already suspected meant pulling data from multiple sources and building reports by hand.
In 2022, Meridian partnered with Todata Analytics to build a custom environment that integrated data across those systems. The project paid off, but it took months of design work, specialized expertise, and significant investment. And once the environment was live, every new question still meant building a new report or modifying a dashboard. That work fell to a small group of analysts.
The experience revealed a lot to me. The traditional model of custom analytics infrastructure works for organizations that can afford it. Many can’t. Over the past year, first as a consultant and now as Todata’s COO, I’ve been working on how to close that gap.
Most organizations don’t struggle because they lack data. Instead, they struggle because the path from question to answer runs through other people. A leader requests a report, waits for someone to build it, reviews the results, asks a follow-up question, and the cycle restarts. That cycle takes days or weeks. In multi-location, multi-system environments, that delay is where opportunities die.
That problem shaped Todata’s product strategy.
Instead of building from scratch for every client, we drew on institutional experience within specific industries to identify the metrics and decision frameworks leaders ask about most. That work produced industry-specific platforms: CPAGrades for accounting firms and SiteGrades for clinical research organizations. These platforms answer the most common performance questions out of the box, without the cost of a custom build.
But no product team can anticipate every question a leader will ask. When a new question comes up, and the only path to an answer is to request a new report from a developer, the old bottleneck is back.
Which brings us to the next phase of Todata.
Both CPAGrades and SiteGrades now include Tod, an AI layer that changes how the whole cycle works. Tod lets users ask questions in natural language and get reports or visualizations in real time. A leader can type ‘Which locations had the largest revenue decline this quarter?’ and see the answer immediately, then follow up, drill down, or change the question entirely.
Another way to think about this: Leaders usually know the right questions. The problem has always been the cost of getting answers. AI and a structured data environment can solve this. What used to take a week now takes a few minutes.
The next step is personalization.
Today, users can generate reports and visualizations dynamically through Tod. Soon, they’ll also be able to pin the charts and insights they find most valuable directly to a personal dashboard. When a leader logs in, the dashboard they see will include reports they built themselves — shaped by their own questions and updated in real time.
Static dashboards still matter. Teams need a shared, consistent, coherent view. But they shouldn’t be the only view.
As a Todata customer in 2021, the Meridian project proved what connected data could do.
Dashboards were never the endgame. The goal has always been to make sophisticated, enterprise-grade analysis accessible to organizations that can’t justify a custom build.
There has always been some distance between a question and an answer. For a lot of businesses, that distance has been measured in people and days.
That distance is about to collapse.
