KITA Is Here: Putting What Your Company Knows to Work

It's taken a while...

About a year ago, we started with an idea. From our experience, the whole idea of goal planning and strategic planning in general kind of sucked. Managers felt it was an imposition of their time, executives cared only about the budget and it took forever for an HR team to administer.

And so we started conceiving of a new way to do this.

But along the way, we realized KITA was never about a single workflow. It was about taking the knowledge, data and experience of the people in an organization and turning it into impact, so teams and their members become successful together. For us, that has always meant shared responsibility and transparency. Data, tools and AI aren't there to replace people. They're there to take the low-value work off their plate, so they have time to make a real impact on their team members, their customers and their own lives.

Where We Started

Our first client was a Malaysian non-profit. Working with them, we saw a bigger pattern. The information needed to plan well already existed. It just wasn't anywhere a manager could use it at the moment of decision. That's what KITA does now. We use AI to turn what your organization knows into decisions and action.

KITA Planning

KITA Planning is where we started, and it's still our baby. It reads your budget, strategic plan and last year's results, and drafts goals from them. Then it connects those goals across teams and levels, so every goal lines up with a company priority.

One of the great things we built for KITA Planning was the Goal Engine. It's a tool that takes your data and documents in its native form and combines it with the input of your team to pre-populate a given team's goals with about 80% accuracy. In other words, about 80% of what it drafts matches what a manager would have most likely included if they'd done it by hand. This was actually the hardest part of what we built and really started us on the road to true knowledge management. A mentor told me in the early days that this would be the hardest part of the project; he was absolutely right. But I think the results are well worth it and we continue to innovate the goal engine to improve that accuracy.

The other thing that was important for us was that KITA should be a communication tool and easy to implement. There's no new system to integrate. When planning's done, you bulk-import the output into your HRIS, performance or project tool in minutes. And we tried to "Pearl Harbor" (we name this after the movie scene where they dumped everything that wasn't needed on the plane to improve how far they could fly) anything that wasn't necessary or that might get a person lost. The result is that individual team members only have to fill in a couple of boxes to do everything they need to do. And for managers, seeing what's happening is super-easy. And of course at the end, we wanted the reports to make sense for people at all levels of the organization.

Some people have asked us, "Does KITA make up our entire plan for us?" The answer is no...not yet. We actually have in mind to do a module for this. But the real strength is in the deployment stage, after you've decided generally what are you looking to do and have decided on your budgets. That's important because that's when the administration can slow down execution.

KITA Intelligence

One of the outgrowths of planning for people's success was to make sure they had data that they could act on. In my experience, I've tried a lot of BI tools; Power BI, Tableau, Polymer and a host of others. These are good tools made for the mass market. You can work off them if you like. But it seems they never really had everything I wanted and a lot of them didn't look good at all.

But there was another thing, one of the problems that I often had with organizations is that I could deliver them the info, but someone had to be there to interpret, analyze and help them to figure out what to do next. There was something kind of unintelligent about BI in that way. I realized that one of the amazing things that AI could contribute was to help managers do that.

It's not about just feeding a report to AI and letting it interpret the results; that always leads to a giant rabbit hole. And it needs to be said that the dashboard is a communication tool as well so what gets said and how it gets said is important too. So really what AI was missing was context. And so this is where AI and BI to me could really join.

So I started building this for a client and it totally reframed the entire communication. All of a sudden, we could see not only what was happening in a given department on its workflow, but we could see what was happening in projects that connected to that department, even if the projects were happening on other systems. And we figured, why not take it a step further and start creating a contextual engine around it. So that's where the Insight Engine idea came about.

At the same time, we realized this is a different kind of project. Organizational data is incredibly sensitive and so we realized this is something that we needed to give them greater power over. The conclusion, let's let companies run it on their own servers, on corporate contracts or even the organization's own LLM so that the data isn't used to train public models.

KITA Intelligence is important for us because it's not just for large organizations. In fact, it's specifically made for small and medium enterprises, especially where analyst headcount is limited or hard to hire. So that's really exciting for us to present to potential partners.

What's Next

KITA Learn is coming soon. It's training built around the skill it should improve, measured by what changes at work afterwards. We'll share more when it's ready.

Over the next few weeks, we'll also publish the thinking behind KITA. Some of it is research on strategy, goals and decisions. Some of it is what we got wrong while building it.

See It on Your Own Data

So now we're looking for partners to help us turn what was an idea months ago into a reality. The best way to judge KITA is to see it work on your own teams. Email us at info@kitastrategy.com or book a demo and we'll set up a short walkthrough around your questions. Curious is a good enough reason to reach out. And we're always looking for feedback, so feel free to reach out to me as well if you have ideas on how we can do even better.