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MARKET INSIGHT Knowledge Management Principles for the CI Professional: Leveraging Big Data Resources
CI practitioners in both large and small companies currently are wrestling with the Big Data explosion of the past few years. While companies are embracing many of the opportunities enabled by the information tsunami, they risk falling prey to information overload. The key now for CI practitioners is to both manage the flood of available information and the expectations of their CI consumers. Effective Knowledge Management strategies can enable the CI practitioner to better manage the information deluge. Knowledge Management has numerous meanings and applications, depending on where you reside in the corporate hierarchy. Wikipedia defines KM as strategies in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. It lists over twenty such strategies that are employed by corporations. For the CI practitioner, traditional collection and analysis tools and structured methodologies are useful, but there are now there are significantly more applications being developed to exploit the explosion of information. There is an incredible array of useful knowledge management tools and platforms that can reduce the time necessary to effectively collect, organize and exploit the collected information. [http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Features/KMWorld-100-Companies-That-Matter-in-Knowledge-Management-87872.aspx.] [Note: The platforms and vendors mentioned in this article are just a small, representational sample of the many companies operating in this market; I make no formal endorsement of any vendor. Each practitioner should fully investigate the software platforms and solutions offered – some are fee-based, proprietary solutions and others are no-cost, open-source solutions.] There are many tools that can be used to collect published information. One that has been around for a while is Watch That Page, a web crawler that searches and alerts you to changes to selected web pages – a good tool to help you monitor your competitors’ press releases, marketing updates, and price changes. Other web crawlers/spiders include YahooPipes or ClearCI. There is also a myriad of news and product monitoring tools, such as Google Alerts, Silobreaker and Innobi. Interestingly, it is the human source collection activities that may benefit most from the Big Data revolution. CI practitioners have to be able answer the major question - “who should I contact who knows what I need to know?” We rely extensively on published information to identify potential human sources – journalists, consultants, academicians and other subject matter experts. The explosion of social media (and its metadata) has been a boon to CI practitioners. In addition to LinkedIn, there are many useful tools to identify potential human sources, such as HootSuite and Klout. New tools, like C-IKnow Visualize, DataSift, as well as open source programs have been developed that can help the CI practitioners collect, visualize and analyze social networks – a key factor in identifying the right person with the right information. To fully exploit this information, new data mining, cluster analysis, and predictive modeling tools are being developed, almost on a daily basis. And there is a whole new category of a Natural Language (Semantic) Processing tools that are being developed to help analyze the content of the data. Vendors like Big Data Lens, Cognition and others are discovering new ways to process the collected information from all sources and efficiently and effectively deriving a better understanding of the content. This “machine learning” capability – textual, sentiment and network analyses – has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of time, and enhance the accuracy, of the analysis produced by CI practitioners. Significant progress also has been made in the delivery of CI content to intelligence consumers. Many companies, like Digimind, Traction Software and Tableau now offer dashboards, blogs, internal wikis and other visualization tools to better communicate analytical results within a corporation. While it appears there is a confounding myriad of tools available to the CI practitioner, I see this as all to the benefit of our consumers. CI practitioners can ride the coattails of the Big Data wave and take advantage of the new capabilities being developed to shorten information processing time and increase the time spent on value-added analysis. About the Author Fred Wergeles is the founder and Principal of Fred Wergeles & Associates LLC, a consulting practice that specializes in Strategic Planning, Market Intelligence and Competitive Analysis. He has over 25 years of experience in the intelligence field in both government and private corporations, and has consulted to companies in a diverse array of industries. Fred is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hartford, teaching a Market Intelligence course in their MBA program and undergraduate courses in Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics. Fred is the Connecticut Chapter Chair of the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals, and in 2012, he received the SCIP Fellows Award for significant contributions to the profession. |
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