In his book Organizational Alpha, author Ben Carlson observes that when an investment office discuss their problems and issues, the focus is less on markets and more on organizational challenges such as governance, process and collaboration. The value of collaboration is immense. So why is collaboration as a functionality so underdeveloped in the investment office?
To answer this question, and search for a solution, I reached out to my friend and invest-tech veteran Ken Akoundi, and we have co-authored a white paper where we dig deeper into why collaboration has been neglected, and how the post-2010 evolution of technology can help investment offices improve their Organizational Alpha.
The time for collaboration tools that address the needs of the long term investor is here. The evolution of technology use in the investment office has followed the availability of technology – from tools to improve investing that have been around since the 1950s to portfolio aggregation and workflow/document management in the 2000s.
In areas outside investing, collaboration technology has evolved from email and messaging to become ubiquitous in the workplace – Slack is used by many startups for firm-wide chatter. Github and Jira are used by software development teams. Even data scientists have their own collaboration platform – Domino Data Lab.
So why has collaboration, which plays a key role in investment operations and decision making, been neglected? In our paper, we conclude that the essence of the problem boils down to a group of talented engineers that haven’t had the opportunity to figure out the true needs of the end client, and a group of unhappy long-term investors who cannot find time to communicate their needs, and are left behind. This is what we are looking to change.
The technology magazine HFMWeek published an article that discusses how our approach toward solving the collaboration problem for long term investors, and Domino Data Lab’s approach toward solving collaboration within hedge fund data science teams could potentially transform collaboration in investing.
We are selectively opening a pilot program to a handful of investment offices. Contact us if you would like to participate.
To access our whitepaper click here. The HFMWeek article can be found here.
Further reading:
- What do we have to do to get all those wonderful toys?
- Unlocking Operational Alpha
- Organizational Alpha
- Who defines the future of invest-tech?
Also published on Medium.