Last week I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic of UIA and how it drives a 'return on information' - the new ROI - during a webinar with Matt Brown from Forrester Research. You can view the webinar on the KMWorld website.

We didn't have time to get to questions so I thought I would tackle them online.

Q: When we were more of a manufacturing marketplace, measuring results and performance was relatively straightforward. It is much more difficult nowadays as service and information providers to measure and grade those same things - not enough info/too much?

A: I think understanding the customer and how they view your products and services has always been important; it has simply been hard to analyze until the internet enabled the incredibly rapid creation of digital content. Social networks, blogs, wikis, etc, all offer a non-stop stream of feedback and competitive insight. No company can afford to ignore it. Technology like sentiment analysis can be used to comb through the data and understand important trends.

As you may have heard, Attivio is growing. We've added some really good people to our team in the last few months - so many in fact that we had to put rows of desks in where we use to have common 'hang out' areas. It's sad to see some of the big round lunch tables go away, but in today's economy, these are really good problems to have. We're moving to new headquarters in the Fall, so common area will be making a comeback soon.

I thought I'd lay out some of the reasons why we're having such success and why Attivio is such an awesome place to work.