When Internal Content Meets External Business Information

Any decision is only as good as the information behind it. Companies know that accurate information is their most important asset, capable of shedding vital insight onto current customers, prospects, competitors, partners and suppliers. However, such information is also volatile, highly perishable, often scarce and costly. Professionals who develop client relationships spend a significant amount of their time obtaining, reviewing and evaluating information. Aside from the enormous cost of ad hoc research conducted by "information amateurs," having the best-possible business intelligence available is crucial to a company's competitive advantage. Educating sales teams on new industries, keeping relationship managers up-to-date on significant customer events, analyzing the financial health of prospects and suppliers, mapping corporate parents and subsidiaries, following changes in executive staffs—all these combine to keep every customer-facing part of the organization on top of its game. Why, then, do corporations determined to arm their professionals with outstanding business intelligence often fail in this mission? As documented time and again, the vast majority of internal client information applications, such as customer portals and CRM installations, consistently fail to achieve their full potential. Why?

Their failure is not due to a lack of database skills or people or dollars. Instead, failure is usually due to:

• Insufficient in-house content expertise;
• Inadequate business information taxonomy; and
• Poor or no tools.

The Three Factors
1. The Expertise Factor. Content optimization and taxonomy development are specialized fields. Most internal corporate staff are not experienced enough to create a robust information solution without expert help.

2. The Taxonomy Factor. The classification regime applied to your information can make all the difference. Most taxonomy solutions being offered on the market have been focused only on unstructured (text) documents, like news files. They run deep on business and topic terms but don't perform well for tagging companies with a unique identifier—the key entity in a customer-focused application. They lack global breadth below the top few thousand companies and they almost all lack the hierarchical corporate family information necessary to identify and tag references to subsidiary operations of diverse multi-national corporations.

3. The Tools Factor. Tools and services to apply taxonomies have likewise focused on auto-classification of textual information, using advanced techniques that analyze the distribution or presence of key words and phrases. While textual classification approaches have become quite sophisticated, they have a significant weakness: they fall down when it comes to handling structured (database- driven) information.

Much critical business information (such as corporate profiles, key contacts, financial data and much more) resides in databases. In fact, the majority of client data needed to populate a CRM or customer portal is exactly this kind of structured database-driven information.

Integrating structured company data requires maintaining a controlled universe of key corporate data and deploying sophisticated matching algorithms. Such algorithms utilize data points like address, phone and postal code and don't just rely on company name. And because no company limits its sales to publicly traded companies, common taxonomies like stock ticker don't cover the necessary universe of companies for customer-facing applications. A complete content integration solution can handle all types of data, including client internal as well as external commercial data, held in a structured database or as unstructured text. All information on a company should be accessible from a single point in a customer portal or CRM system.

A solution should include:

• A broad, integrated taxonomy that covers companies, topics, industries/lines of business and geographies equally well. The taxonomy should encompass both metadata for textual documents (e.g. call reports, news stories) and structured company data (e.g. corporate profiles and sales histories). Applying an extensive taxonomy to internal data creates an organized, interrelated dataset that can be explored and filtered quickly and accurately. And if that robust taxonomy is supported and maintained by a commercial business information service, a seamless link to external content can be established more easily.
• Support for company aliases, former names, common identifiers (like ticker and CUSIP) and subsidiary names. The taxonomy should support mapping to a variety of commercial company identifiers, so you have the option to integrate multiple commercial sources.
• Complete integration with industry standards like SIC and ISO codes as well as other proprietary schemes. Any commercial taxonomy that ignores standard codes (perhaps because it was built for application to a particular vendor's data set) is not robust enough.
• Auto-classification tools to apply a taxonomy to unstructured text documents with a high degree of accuracy.
• Automated matching tools to map structured company files to a common company taxonomy.
• Editorial review as well as automated matching and classification techniques, because no automated tool can perform matching to the high degree of certainty and completeness required for CRM or customer portals.
• An ongoing maintenance component to keep content up-to-date (e.g. name changes, effects of mergers and acquisitions, etc.) When internal content is wisely integrated with external business information, the result is a new level of business intelligence that affects the entire customer lifecycle. Sales preparation is better, close ratios are higher, risk is mitigated, due diligence is robust, insight is deeper, responses are faster and confidence is greater throughout.

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Brad Haigis is VP of products at OneSource Information Serviceswhere he leads product management and product marketing. Brad has led product management teams at companies involved in enterprise-level content management, e-commerce and database applications. Haigis earned an MBA from the University of Michigan and his BS in computer science from Union College. OneSource has set the standard for value-added business information. We integrate content from over 30 diverse providers—representing 2,500 separate information sources—into one powerful tool for sales, marketing, finance and management consulting professionals.