New Business Intelligence
The Promise of Knowledge Management, the ROI of Business Intelligence
As the fields of Business Intelligence (BI) and Knowledge Management (KM) have evolved over the last two decades, they have done so until recently in seemingly parallel universes.
Business Intelligence, relying on traditional business tools and searching well organized and structured data, has emerged over 20 years as a well-established niche in which information is readily accessible, most players understand each other's languages and processes, and a return on investment (ROI) is easy to define and calculate. The KM field (now appearing to overlap with Enterprise Content Management) has been more nebulous. Younger by at least a decade than BI, it revolves around suites of products, from full-text indexing and search to information filtering and natural language processing. KM often presents the more challenging task because it exists without commonly accepted terminologies, and ROI for such initiatives are often harder to define.
But several technological developments, including those spurred by Intelliseek, Inc., are building bridges between KM and BI, with obvious benefits. Two factors fueling this emergence of what Intelliseek calls "New Business Intelligence" (NBI) are the growth of Internet information and evolving technologies that aggregate, analyze and report data from a variety of previously incompatible sources. Accepted business tools that traditionally used to find and leverage BI data are now crossing over into the KM field, able to find more and better information, make it actionable quickly and offer the promise of greater ROI for strategic planning, sales, decision-making and competitive or strategic advantage.
The trend bodes well for any business, agency, enterprise or brand interested in a comprehensive 360º view from the richest data available. In the current separate-silo universe, BI usually has access to about 20% of available information from databases, online analytical processing, supply chain management, data warehouses, and the like, but it commands roughly 80% of the relevent budget for business purposes. By contrast, NBI can benefit far more knowledge workers and reach a far larger pool of data, perhaps 50% to 60% of available information in product documents, research reports, employee records and the like, but it attracts perhaps 20% of the traditional budget for IT-related purposes.
The convergence of the two fields deepens and broadens the amount of searchable knowledge and information—simultaneously increasing the value, actionability and ROI on the intelligence gained. In fact, the greatest value of unstructured data comes when it is converted to intelligence that can then be mined, sliced and diced by traditional business tools—Business Objects®, MicroStrategy®, Cognos®, Informatica®, Oracle®, Microsoft®, etc. When KM and BI converge to create NBI, the resulting intelligence involves broader insights, not just raw data. It provides trends, not just raw statistics. It includes historical context, not just a shallow examination of what's apparent and easily accessible. Instead of nuggets or pockets of information from corporate databases, it provides a true 360º view of attitudes and behaviors, combines structured and unstructured data, meshes solicited and unsolicited feedback, and keeps a real-time pulse on business.
The good news is that NBI has arrived and it's evolving quickly. Intelliseek's Enterprise Search Server™ (ESS) and BrandPulse™ are two such breakthrough products, able to capture vast amounts of information from disparate sources and deliver actionable intelligence. ESS provides a universal application to discover and capture data from hundreds of relevant, disparate sources—the Internet, intranets, corporate document management systems, discussions rooms, message boards, specialty groups, subscription sources and others. Once information and data are captured, ESS uses state-of-the-art enterprise tools to automatically categorize, analyze, report, track, and generate high-quality results ready for research, collaboration and intelligence extraction. Intelliseek's BrandPulse product, with patent-pending text-mining processes, extracts "intelligence," generates actionable alerts and creates hundreds of reports on emerging trends, new product ideas, brewing rumors, marketing/advertising messages, consumer sentiment, competitive measures and more.
NBI has the potential to capture niche markets heretofore overlooked in traditional BI—consumer intelligence, media intelligence, intellectual property intelligence, human resource intelligence and others. Hard-and-fast internal company databases can now be combined with insight-rich unstructured data. Results can be used for better marketing, deeper intelligence, lead generation and merger/acquisition research. In fact, leading clients using such technology include In-Q-Tel, the venture funding arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, General Electric Capital Aviation Services and Procter & Gamble.
Without KM, Business Intelligence is not complete; without BI tools, KM remains elusive. Yet with the convergence of the two parallel universes, NBI is able to do more with better technology, to enable key players to make better, faster decisions and to finally use accepted business practices and technologies to tap into a full spectrum of information and knowledge for profit and financial success.
Intelliseek is changing the way businesses think about, gather and use critical information. The company creates and delivers smart-search technology and applications that capture, track and analyze enterprise information and consumer intelligence from thousands of sources to deliver targeted, relevant and actionable intelligence. Leading companies use Intelliseek's adaptable and cost-saving solutions to empower their key decision makers with comprehensive, up-to-the-minute industry information for a variety of purposes: strategic planning, business and competitive intelligence, cutting-edge product development, brand marketing, and reputation management