Data Fabric and Data Lineage are two terms we see a lot – on websites, in blogs and technical papers – but what’s the relevance? What do we really need to understand about our data and its power?
Manta and Talend send their data experts to visit the Innovation Sandbox.Ernie Ostic (M) and Rolf Heimes (T) answer questions about data and explore its significance in today’s new normal – all delivered with a dose of their personal style and passion for the topic.
Process Mining – isn’t is the same as Process Mapping, or Data Mining? No. And understanding what makes Process Mining different can give you a definite advantage when looking to improve efficiencies in your business. And why should you improve efficiencies? So you can successfully cut costs, improve customer satisfaction, improve employee morale, and increase revenue.
In this video, Process Mining expert and Prolifics’ Global Head of Digital Automation and Cloud Solutions, Anant Gupta, explains process mining and explores the benefits – regardless of your industry. Watch now.
If you’re a lender, or work in IT for a lending institution, you’ve likely felt the ripple effects of the “New Normal” in very specific ways. Interest rates are at historic lows, but what does that really mean for mortgage demand? The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) arrived like a hurricane—so what’s next? And after so much disruption, what should you be doing to support your employees?
Believe it or not, a digital loan coworker can help with each of these challenges. By integrating digital workers for loan processing into your operations, you can streamline tasks, scale capacity, and improve accuracy without adding unnecessary strain to your team.
1) How a Digital Loan Coworker Helps Manage Mortgage Volume
The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) recently reported record-low mortgage rates, with the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage dropping 72 basis points in a year to just 3.03%. While long-term demand remains uncertain, refinancing activity has surged. Freddie Mac’s research shows single-family first lien refinances reached nearly $400 billion—double the previous year’s volume.
Managing workforce size amid fluctuating demand is challenging.
Hire too many staff, and you risk layoffs.
Hire too few, and your team becomes overwhelmed.
Add remote work, and the complexity multiplies.
Here’s where mortgage automation solutions make a difference. A digital loan coworker can scale up or down instantly based on loan volume—no hiring or training required. This approach supports mortgage scalability, enabling you to handle refinancing surges through automated mortgage processing efficiently.
Key benefits include:
Quick response to market fluctuations
Cost-effective scaling without added staff
Improved speed and accuracy in loan processing
2) The Customer Service Example – PPP Loan Forgiveness
Remember the chaos during the initial PPP loan rush—full lobbies, endless phone calls, and piles of paperwork? Many lenders successfully helped businesses secure funding, but the next challenge—PPP loan forgiveness—brought similar pressure.
The SBA released a simplified, borrower-friendly PPP forgiveness application and a three-page “EZ” version for certain cases. Despite these tools, businesses still needed fast results, creating massive processing demands.
A digital loan coworker can streamline this process by:
Reading and sorting incoming emails
Collecting and verifying loan applications
Performing data consistency checks
Routing information automatically to the next step
This intelligent process automation for lenders speeds up forgiveness approvals, improves service quality, and prevents the bottlenecks seen during the initial rollout. It’s also the foundation for scalable PPP loan forgiveness automation, freeing your team to focus on meaningful customer interactions.
3) The Free Up Your Employees Example – Across All Loan Types
Every lending operation handles repetitive, manual tasks—matching data, re-keying information, and navigating disconnected systems. These tasks are time-consuming, error-prone, and lower morale, especially in remote settings.
A digital loan coworker never tires of repetitive work. It runs 24/7, maintains near-zero error rates, and bridges data silos across systems. By leveraging robotic process automation (RPA) in banking, you can:
Reduce human error in loan processing
Save time on manual data entry
Boost employee satisfaction through more engaging work
This isn’t about replacing people—it’s about empowering them. With automation handling routine work, employees can focus on tasks that require human judgment and customer empathy.
Top advantages of digital coworkers in lending:
Improved employee engagement and retention
Higher accuracy and faster turnaround times
Lower operational costs
Partner with Experts Who Understand Lending Automation
The “New Normal” demands efficiency, scalability, and agility. You must adapt quickly to changing market conditions while minimizing costs.
Prolifics offers digital workers for loan processing—like Archie, your own digital loan coworker—designed to deliver fast, accurate, and seamless results. Our expertise covers:
Automation for mortgage refinancing and PPP loans
Scalable solutions for fluctuating lending demand
End-to-end digital transformation for financial institutions
Whether you want to explore how a digital coworker improves mortgage processing or implement PPP loan forgiveness automation, we can help you transform operations and prepare for long-term success.
Ready to get started? Email solutions@prolifics.com to discover how automation can future-proof your lending business.
National Geographic named him the Wizard of Big Data. He works on innovation, national security and privacy with government leaders, think tanks and executives all over the world. And now, Jeff Jonas is talking with you from inside the Innovation Sandbox!
Within just a few weeks, many lenders faced a hurricane of anxious customers and their paperwork for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. It may feel like we’re now in the calm eye of that hurricane, but it’s not over. The back end of the same hurricane is fast approaching in the form of PPP loan forgiveness. Often where a hurricane goes next is unpredictable, and so it is with PPP forgiveness. For you lenders out there, let’s cover what we know.
How do my customers apply for PPP loan forgiveness?
After the initial May release of a complicated, calculation-rich form, the SBA subsequently issued what they described as a “revised, borrower-friendly Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan forgiveness application.” This was in response to mandates in the Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act (PPPFA) passed in early June. The revision took the original forgiveness application from 11 pages down to five. You can find the revised SBA form here Lenders – Are You Ready for PPP, Part 2: Forgiveness?.
In addition, the SBA also published a new “EZ version” of the forgiveness application – just three pages – that applies to certain borrowers under specific circumstances. The EZ application requires fewer calculations and less documentation for eligible borrowers – you can find it here Lenders – Are You Ready for PPP, Part 2: Forgiveness?.
According to the SBA, “These changes will result in a more efficient process and make it easier for businesses to realize full forgiveness of their PPP loan.”
What will be forgiven?
To perhaps over-simplify, if business owners spend at least 60 percent of the loan on payroll costs within 24 weeks of receiving the loan, the whole loan will be forgiven. (The owner should spend the remaining percentage on mortgage, rent and/or utilities.) The 24-week period can’t extend beyond Dec. 31, 2020. The PPPFA changed these numbers from 75 percent and eight weeks, with the express purpose of making forgiveness more accessible. If a business owner misses the 60 percent mark, they can still get a portion of the loan forgiven – it’s not an all-or-nothing calculation.
24 is better than eight.
Both new applications give the option of using the original 8-week period (for loans before June 5, 2020) or an extended 24-week period. This should help spread out the forgiveness application crunch. But you should encourage your customers to apply once that 60 percent is reached – and not wait for the 24 weeks. Most businesses would want the debt gone as soon as possible.
Remember – PPP money is still available.
According to the SBA, PPP provided “4.5 million small business loans totaling more than $500 billion to ensure that approximately 50 million hardworking Americans stay connected to their jobs.” There is still about $130 billion available. But hurry – August 8 is now the new deadline for all PPP loan approvals.
Prolifics can help.
Our PPP Digital Loan Officer, Archie, can help you and your customers by processing new PPP loans in two minutes. And, when your customers look to have their loans forgiven, Archie can help you again – he understands the loan forgiveness eligibility rules and process. Visit Archie or email us at solutions@prolifics.com.
“The fabric of our lives.” We all know this as a phrase the cotton industry has used for years. But given the exponential flood of information we devour today, there’s really a new fabric that all organizations need to understand and live with – data fabric. And as that data fabric is weaved, it’s important to know where the data originated and how it flows – the data lineage.
Gartner ranked data fabric as a top 10 data and analytics trend for 2019.
What is data fabric all about?
The term “data fabric” has been around for a few years but has only recently gained more attention and traction. Leading research and advisory company Gartner had it as one of their “Top 10 Data and Analytics Technology Trends for 2019.”
Prolifics partner Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, knows a thing or two about data fabric. Last month, independent research firm Forrester named Talend “a leader in enterprise data fabric evaluation.” Talend describes data fabric this way:
Think of data fabric as a weave that is stretched over a large space that connects multiple locations, types, and sources of data, with methods for accessing that data. The data can be processed, managed, and stored as it moves within the data fabric.
In simplest terms, a data fabric is a single environment consisting of a unified architecture, and services or technologies running on that architecture, that helps organizations manage their data. The ultimate goal of data fabric is to maximize the value of your data and accelerate digital transformation…
Where does data lineage fit in?
Data lineage is describing where data came from (how it entered your organization), how it’s moved and spread through the organization, the data’s characteristics and how it’s changed, and its overall quality. Prolifics partner MANTA succinctly describes the importance of data lineage:
What makes a decision bulletproof? Solid data. What makes data solid? Knowing its source, its journey, and all its transformations from the moment it entered the database to the moment you saw it in the report you are using to make your decision.
For MANTA, data lineage is more important than ever given today’s environment. When dealing with data privacy regulations, like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), MANTA notes that “data governance (is) made possible with powerful data lineage…full lineage is a must when proving compliance with any data-oriented regulation.” When dealing with the unexpected, like remote workers in a pandemic lockdown, “…understanding of how your data flows and its transformations, you will easily come up with strategies to overcome the data-related obstacles that the current pandemic has caused for your organization.”
Learn more
“Innovation Sandbox – Powered by Prolifics,” is a new, six-week YouTube Live series with today’s brightest minds, latest tech and most creative ideas.
Episode 2: “Take a Byte Out of Data,” airs live on Thursday, July 16, 10-10:30 a.m. ET on our YouTube channel, Prolifics TV. Rolf Heimes from Talend and Ernie Ostic from MANTA will discuss how companies that adopt new technologies, architectures, and methodologies for data will succeed – while companies that don’t will risk becoming obsolete. Learn more here Data Fabric and Data Lineage – The Basics.
AI-driven IT is no longer a future concept — it’s the reality shaping how businesses succeed in 2025. Remember the New Normal? What began in 2020 as a period of unprecedented change has evolved into a fully realized digital age. Remote work isn’t a temporary pivot; it’s now a permanent fixture of our culture.
The conversation has shifted from reacting to a crisis to strategically navigating the future of IT. As we move into 2025 and 2026, the real question for IT leaders is: How do you build a resilient, innovative, and competitive organization? The answer lies in moving beyond adaptation and embracing the next wave of strategic initiatives — built on the four pillars of AI-driven IT success.
Why AI-Driven IT Matters in 2025
Here are four updated strategies for IT success in the AI-driven era.
1. Build a hyper-agile and secure hybrid infrastructure
The future of work is undeniably hybrid, but success depends on more than just providing a laptop and a video conferencing tool. The new focus is on creating a flexible, secure, and seamless digital environment that supports employees wherever they are.
Invest in a zero-trust architecture: Move beyond perimeter-based security. A zero-trust model verifies every user and device trying to access network resources, securing your distributed workforce against modern threats.
Optimize employee experience (EX): Focus on a unified digital experience. This means investing in next-gen collaboration and productivity platforms that are intuitive, integrate seamlessly, and ensure employees feel connected and productive from any location.
Leverage SASE (Secure Access Service Edge): Adopt a SASE framework that converges network and security functions into a single, cloud-native service. This provides secure, low-latency access for all users, regardless of their location, solidifying your IT resilience.
2. Prioritize proactive, AI-powered cybersecurity
The threat landscape has grown increasingly sophisticated. Relying on reactive security measures is no longer sufficient. In 2025, proactive cybersecurity driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is a core business function, not just an IT responsibility.
Implement AI-driven threat detection: Use AI and machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data, detect anomalies, and identify potential threats in real time before they can cause damage.
Embrace predictive security: Move from simply reacting to threats to anticipating them. AI-powered analytics can help identify vulnerabilities and predict potential attack vectors, allowing your team to reinforce defenses proactively.
Automate incident response: Automate security workflows and protocols to accelerate threat response times. This allows your security team to focus on higher-level strategy rather than getting bogged down in manual, repetitive tasks.
3. Scale innovation with AI and automation
The strategic value of IT is no longer just about keeping the lights on—it’s about accelerating innovation and driving business value. By leveraging AI and automation, IT can free up resources and enable strategic growth.
Adopt hyperautomation: Combine intelligent automation (IA) and robotic process automation (RPA) to automate complex business processes across your organization. This frees up talent for more creative and strategic projects that move the business forward.
Accelerate your targeted cloud strategy: The cloud is the engine of AI. Optimize your existing cloud investments by focusing on strategic initiatives with a clear business purpose, not just a “lift and shift” of legacy applications.
Democratize AI adoption: Equip business units with low-code/no-code AI tools, allowing them to build custom solutions and drive innovation without deep technical expertise. This fosters a culture of innovation and enables a truly agile organization.
4. Strategically upskill and reskill the IT workforce
Technology evolves faster than ever, and so must your team. The best IT leaders are prioritizing continuous learning to build a resilient and highly skilled workforce for the future of IT.
Cultivate an AI-fluent workforce: Provide targeted training in AI, machine learning, and data science. This ensures your team can not only implement AI solutions but also identify new opportunities to apply them.
Prioritize soft skills: As technical tasks become more automated, skills like problem-solving, collaboration, and strategic thinking become paramount. Invest in training that develops these uniquely human capabilities.
Implement data-driven learning paths: Use internal data and analytics to identify skill gaps and create personalized learning paths. This ensures your IT upskilling initiatives are both efficient and aligned with your long-term digital transformation strategy.
Conclusion
From pandemic response to AI-driven transformation, IT’s role has evolved dramatically in just five years. The 4 Pillars of IT Success in the AI-Driven Era—hyper-agile hybrid infrastructure, AI-powered cybersecurity, scaled AI innovation, and workforce upskilling—provide a framework for sustainable success in 2025 and beyond.
Organizations that invest in these pillars today will be positioned not just to adapt but to lead in a future defined by constant change.
Is your company doing all it can to grow and thrive in today’s new normal? Your data may hold the key. Big digital transformation investments have given way to smaller projects that focus on lowering costs and customer churn, and increasing margins and sales. It starts with data – finding your data, knowing you can trust it, and who uses it.
Brian Kordelski, Global Sales Leader with Prolifics, and Rolf Heimes, Global Head of Channel with Talend, invite you to an interesting and informative conversation about the data journey and how to “give your organization the data it deserves.”
The term “garbage in, garbage out” is as relevant to your data today as it was 20 years ago. If your company’s data is in chaos – incomplete, fragmented, trapped in siloes, hidden in legacy systems, poorly identifiable, duplicated – anything you try to do with that data will be, unfortunately, garbage.
Four Ways Your Data Chaos Will Hurt You – Badly
The pandemic shutdown exposed or exacerbated problems with cost optimization, cost efficiency, business continuity and disaster recovery. As companies reopen and retool post-lockdown, it’s more important than ever that you have clean and complete data – everything starts with having a handle on your data. If it’s in chaos, it will hurt you.
1) The drip, drip, drip of legacy systems
It’s kind of a “Catch-22” scenario – your data situation is in chaos because of your legacy systems, but you don’t think you can move from the legacy systems because of how deeply ingrained your data is. But legacy systems cost more to maintain, things take longer, and opportunities are missed. Data is growing exponentially at a time when you need speed and efficiency – but that new data is going into chaos. Whether moving to the cloud or staying on-prem, it’s time for application modernization and integration. You don’t need to do it all at once – but you better start soon, or the drips will keep on coming.
2) The data privacy movement
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and laws like it give individuals a level of control over how companies use their collected data. This includes the “right to be forgotten” – a company must delete a requestor’s information in its systems as mandated. Fines can add up – in CCPA it’s $2,500 per compliance violation, going up to $7,500 if the violation is deemed intentional. If you don’t know what data matches to which customers, or all the nooks and crannies where that data is and how to get to it, the penalties could add up fast.
3) Entity resolution
“Wizard of Data” Jeff Jonas defines entity resolution as “who is who and who is related to who” in data. The common terms identity resolution; record linking, matching and deduplication; and “merge-purge” are forms of ER. Entity resolution means you have a single version of something that your business must deal with, like a customer or a vendor, or you understand the relationship between somethings, like which salesman belongs with which vendor. If your data is garbage, and entity resolution is difficult, you’re setting yourself up for problems from bad customer experiences and cost inefficiencies to outright fraud.
4) Advanced and predictive analytics
Companies today are using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools to automatically detect sophisticated data patterns to predict potential outcomes, giving them better decision-making insight and abilities. For example, a financial organization using AI/ML can analyze its entire historical loan portfolio on an ongoing basis, learning and recognizing patterns of factors in real time that lead to a much higher rate of default. If a new loan application has those factors, the AI/ML program would flag it for denial. AI/ML is for “what’s next” questions, like which current customers will likely buy your new product or when will a piece of equipment break down. These insights can have you crushing your competition – unless your data is in chaos. Then the competition will be crushing you.
Get a handle on your data
Prolifics experts can help you with your data, systems modernization and integration, and cloud and hybrid cloud platforms. Visit www.prolifics.com or email solutions@prolifics.com.
Coffee with Talend
Join data experts Brian Kordelski (Prolifics) and Rolf Heimes (Talend) for a discussion on how companies are striving to be leaner and more efficient when it comes to housing and managing data. They’ll also look at how migrating to an opensource framework can be cost-effective and quickly deployed. More information and registration here 4 Ways Your Data Chaos Will Hurt You.
You already know that in most cases, it’s easier to retain an employee than to find a new one.
Still, while a strong onboarding process has been shown to improve new hire retention by as much as 82%, only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees.
This month’s infographic shows the pressures HR staff faces with traditional onboarding and how automating those processes can make new employees happier while easing the burden for HR managers.
Problems With Manual Onboarding
Starting a new job can be stressful, but a smooth onboarding process can make new employees feel welcome, excited and motivated.
It is the HR staff’s responsibility to ensure a new hire fully understands not only their job duties, but also the company culture they’re now a part of.
Unfortunately, complications can arise during a typical manual onboarding process — both for the new employee and the HR staff. These include:
Friction among employees and managers due to poorly defined job duties and inadequate training
Consuming too much of HR personnel schedule
Exposing the company to security risks (through data privacy violations, for example)
How Automated Onboarding Benefits HR Managers
Streamlined processes, better decision making and empowered employees – that’s what intelligent automation brings to your onboarding process. Advances in intelligent automation can create efficiencies and scalabilities for your business that were unheard of before.
A process that is sustainable, compliant, and scalable can help HR managers deliver a smooth, seamless onboarding experience. An automated process can deliver this experience and consistently:
Save time and resources. For example, new hires can enter their personal information once and it will automatically populate across W-4, I-9, 401(k) and other relevant forms.
Minimize the risk of errors (and resulting compliance issues).
Gain insights by collecting and aggregating data to identify skill gaps and behavior trends (which in turn helps with retention and training).
Reassure new hires about their role, making it easier to acclimate to the corporate culture and transition from their prior role.
Ultimately, automated onboarding software eases the pressure on HR staff by making things easier for the new employees while effectively providing and collecting information. A painless and productive onboarding process reassures all involved, leaving new hires more optimistic about their future within their new organization.
