Let’s Talk Knowledge

There has been an extremely interesting, yet nascent, trend in the information industry over the past 12 months. It’s a trend that’s been enabled by new technologies, forward thinking, and good old fashioned common sense. There has been a lot of effort put forth to combine the tools and platforms that help users analyze and discover data from internal systems, with those that access content from outside the firewall.

The combination of course make sense. Probably the best way of explaining what I mean is by example. For the last decade companies have been investing in Business Intelligence platforms that help them analyze information from their internal ERP/CRM systems and the like. This allows, for example, someone to get analysis on a customer, how much they spend with a company annually, and how often they may call customer service for product support. Sophisticated BI tools can even begin to draw correlations between the number of calls in a given period, and the increase or decrease in spend from that customer, based on previous patterns.

Now, the ERP/CRM/BI vendors are looking to add more value (and grab more share of wallet) to the reports and analysis by integrating information from outside the enterprise. So in the previous example step one may be as simple as adding current news about a customer to the analysis. More sophisticated platforms are looking at using external data, such as stock price or EPS, as part of the equation when predicting future spend.

From an end user perspective this is extremely powerful. It really does allow someone to look at their customer with a holistic viewpoint. Internal data alone can never tell a complete story. External news and information fails to take your relationship with the customer into account. Bringing them together provides a powerful context.

There are a few implications of this trend. First, a new eye is going to be turned towards the analysis of unstructured data. The large vendors have gotten very adept at analyzing structured data from a database. But few companies have exceled at doing true analysis on data in a variety of formats, from a variety of sources.

The second implication is how external information will be sourced by organizations. Today external information purchasing is generally the purview of the corporate library or knowledge management center. As these new platforms emerge, IT will begin to identify, and drive, more and more of the purchasing of external content. Their requirements for purchasing will be different than today as well. More attention will be paid to delivery format and data quality than will be paid to the accessibility of the information. IT will need to get content in standard, easy to parse and consume formats, and since the information will be put in from of much larger parts of the enterprise, information quality will get more scrutiny.

One of the challenges that will present itself will be the discovery of the appropriate sources of external content. While Librarians are very well aware of the most reliable, accurate, and timely sources of information for an industry or topic, IT professionals are not. Publishers that can understand how their content can be consumed in the context of existing ERP/CRM/BI platforms will have an advantage as they can market themselves appropriately.

There have been many recent announcements from major players like IBM, Oracle, and SAS. Another interesting development has been the emergence of Data as a Service. Solutions like Microsoft’s Dallas are making it easy for developers to discover, subscribe, and integrate content from premium (AP, Infogroup) and free (Data.gov, undata) sources.

I think it is an exciting and rapidly blossoming opportunity to provide business intelligence in context to users throughout the enterprise. If executed well, it can all be done within the context of the user’s existing workflow which bodes well for user adoption. Now, when you combine this trend with the collaboration and communication possibilities provided by Social Networking, you can begin to see the knowledge worker of the future will have insight into business decisions that we only dream of today.

- Ken

I mentioned in my last post that a shift in focus will be taking place in technology. Instead of creating, storing, distributing, and retrieving (as my friend Christine pointed out), technology will turn its focus to tools to help make sense of the vast amounts of valuable information made available to us. I wonder though if it isn’t the simplest of technologies, which already exists, that will be one of the most beneficial to us.

What could be better than a tool that would understand what decision point we are trying to support, go find all of the relevant information, then analyze it and present it in an easily consumable manner like a dashboard? How about someone who has recently made the same or similar decision? Someone who has already either manually or through technology synthesized large amounts of information, understands the sources of the most valuable data, and maybe even knows the context in which you are making a decision.

Learning from the knowledge of others is something we’re very accustomed to doing, and very comfortable with. Really, the idea of Search is to connect us to the materials that others have put together, so we can benefit from the knowledge they posses without knowing who they are. But now, we have social networks and messaging systems that help us easily find those people, and subsequently the knowledge they have.

Imagine discovering a company you are not familiar with in a news article, and wanting to know who their competitors are. If you use the standard means of Search, you would spend some time on Google, or your intranet, or a research tool like Factiva to get your answer. Think instead if you could click on the company, and have a list of people in your enterprise or industry peers that have a relationship to that company (a procurement person, a sales person, a technology person, etc.). An instant (or micro) message directed at one or more of the people listed, gives you access to all of there knowledge. They will likely either know the answer directly, or be able to tell you where to find the answer.

Intelligence obtained from your social network, not your ability to search. Connecting with people that are informed, not finding relevant information. A powerful way to benefit from the volumes of information we are presented with, and not be overwhelmed by it.

Of course enabling social intelligence is only one of the things that needs to happen. New information management technologies are still critical. I just think we should do our best to get the most out of our existing technologies, while future technologies are being development.