Whoever nods has three spreadsheets

On 8 September we were at DIGITAL X in Cologne, in the Startup Harbour on the Rheinau promenade, on Deutsche Telekom's partner area.

We went with a question rather than a presentation. That was the only preparation that mattered in the end.

Seventy-two modules in four minutes

A platform covering information security, data protection and IT operations on one shared set of data cannot be shown in a trade fair conversation. You can try. The result is a click-through nobody remembers by the evening, and the impression that it is complicated.

So we did it the other way round and took exactly one question with us:

What does a register look like that serves information security, data protection and IT operations at the same time, without being maintained three times over?

That is not a sales question. It is the question that shows within two sentences whether someone has the same problem we had before we built isidaten.

The answer is on their face

Whoever nods has three spreadsheets describing the same device. One in asset management, one in the record of processing activities, one in the protection needs assessment. All three are maintained, no two agree, and nobody knows which one is right.

Whoever looks politely does not have that problem. That is a result too, and it arrives after two minutes instead of twenty. Both sides gain from it.

The three of us standing there was therefore not a scheduling accident but deliberate. The question can go in three directions, and whichever one somebody takes, the answer comes from the person whose desk that topic lands on daily. A data protection officer can tell from a single follow-up question whether the person opposite maintains the register themselves or merely signs it.

What we take away

The conversations were good, and some of them will lead somewhere. We will not say more than that, because whoever quotes numbers after a trade fair is usually selling the numbers rather than what was discussed.

What stays is an observation about preparation. We travelled with a question because we had no time for a demo. Next time we will do it the same way, even when there is time.

Did we meet?

If we spoke and the note has gone missing: the event contact page has a few fields, and we will follow up on whatever we discussed.

And the question above can be answered without a trade fair too. It leads not to a single module but to the architecture: seventy-two modules in seven pillars, interlocked so data is maintained only once and is the same in every discipline. The product overview shows it.