We frequently hear complaints that a critical event should have been avoided, but groups of people were unable to "connect the dots." The problem expressed here is that the dots are all available in various repositories, but there was no way to synthesize the intelligence, which would appear only after the information was assembled and analyzed. Inaction itself isn't the issue — it's a problem of access to insight. You can't act on what you don't know.

The publicized unconnected dots stories are typically about poor communication and information sharing among government agencies, but corporations suffer from the same challenges — even when all or most of the dots are internal data.

In an op-ed piece published recently in the Washington Post, Toyota President Akio Toyoda addressed the company's recent recall of nearly 8 million cars to correct serious safety problems, a crisis that has eroded a fifth of the company's market value (or $30bn) and has already cost the company over $2bn. Toyoda acknowledged that the root of the problem was that the company "failed to connect the dots." He went on to say that the company needed to improve "sharing important quality and safety information across our global operations."

"When consumers purchase a Toyota, they are not simply purchasing a car, truck or van. They are placing their trust in our company," Toyoda wrote. The cost of not connecting the dots can destroy not only quantifiable market value but also the long-term value of the brand. That trust, once tarnished, is hard to restore.

Businesses aren't suffering alone from poorly consolidated and under-communicated insight. This is a critical — and sometime life or death — issue for government and law enforcement agencies. In a recent article President Obama was quoted as saying that the so-called underwear bomber had been allowed to board a plane "because U.S. intelligence agencies failed to share data and make sense of it - or connect the dots, as some say — to identify the threat before it materialized." In that same report, Attivio's CTO, Sid Probstein commented that, "The government has a very real problem filtering through that data to find the pieces that will actually help analysts. The government needs tools that help organize filtered data."

Fixing this vital problem has frustrated IT departments and software vendors for years. One key contributing factor is that information is stored in many forms and is retrieved via incompatible technologies, ensuring that the process of assembling and connecting dots will not be simple and seamless. For example, pulling data from a database and connecting it to an email or call log is difficult and frequently not even attempted. When you add in complicating dynamics such as the exploding volume of information that could contain relevant data and the difficulty of efficiently managing access permissions, the risk of missing an important insight is significant.

Unified Information Access (UIA) emerged to address the increasingly painful problem of not being able to get complete, relevant insight in time to be effective and successful. Whether that success is early detection of trends to identify the issues before they mushroom into serious problems, having complete details about a customer at each interaction, or preventing a threat, comprehensive insight is not a luxury. And it is attainable today through UIA.

A key benefit of UIA from Attivio is that in addition to connecting dots on demand in response to a query, you can also automatically monitor and detect information-based activities in real time, applying user-defined text-based filters that trigger specific actions when a piece of information passes through the filter. Filters have the full complexity of a search and text mining environment. Rules are typically defined for a particular class of investigation like PII, PCI, IP policing, etc. In addition to offering these filtering and rule-application capabilities, Attivio also supports a full array of textual analytics on the ever-expanding corpus of information that makes up the communication landscape of a typical enterprise.

Avoiding problems, detecting opportunity and bolstering customer satisfaction are all critical to success. The most effective way to make substantial improvements in all these areas is to take advantage of UIA's ability to deliver insight. Want to know more? Please join us at an upcoming webinar featuring Attivio CTO Sid Probstein and Forrester Analyst Matt Brown: Driving Critical Return on Information Assets, which will be presented on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 2PM ET/1900 GMT.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)