Enhanced Views Are A Winning Play

Competing on Innovation and Insight

“The only thing better than certain insight is certain insight you don’t have to work hard to find.”

Our view of any business situation is enhanced when every relevant insight is available for consideration.  In the early days of search, our queries determined precisely what we found.  We were limited by the data that was indexed and the terms we searched.

Now, ask a question of your smartphone.  If you have location services activated, you may be surprised that you get a bit more than you expected in the answer.  If the context of your location is related to your question, you’ll be informed – even though you didn’t explicitly ask.  Isn’t that nice?

We have reached the point where insight can and should flow directly to those who can use it – informing, advising, updating, and anticipating what we need. In that world, the future belongs not to those with the most data, but to those with the best means for discovering and using its context.  Delivering insight is the core objective.

Four Steps to Winning on Insight

In earlier posts, we looked at the role data democratization, virtual data marts, security and governance, and self-service data discovery play in reducing the friction commonly associated with gaining analytic insight.  These forces and responses are part of a larger innovation mosaic that’s building in financial services, manufacturing, retail, technology, and other industries.  The competition is not on data – it’s on the insight that data can provide.

To compete effectively on analytic insight, your organization will need to compete successfully on four fronts.

First, they will compete on data discovery.  While there’s undoubtedly yet-to-be-discovered insight in your existing information – effectively profiling, identifying, and unifying new information sources for analysis will distinguish the disruptors from the disrupted.  Data lakes, Hadoop projects, and Big Data initiatives are likely venues for this ‘data discovery’ competition.  Can you compete on the heavy lifting – finding the right sources for analysis?

Second, they will compete on providing immediate visibility into every data source.  Connecting new sources laden with latent insight, quickly and with minimal friction, insures that your enhanced view is up-to-date.  Data from social/mobile platforms and the Internet of Things are certain to test data storage and source discovery in the next five years.  Can you compete on hitting the bull’s-eye – keeping your views of mission-critical elements (customers, products, market’s and assets) on target?

Third, they will compete on enriching and determining the deep structure of information in the sources they add and the repositories they profile.  Increasingly, the challenge is combining information from sources with radically different structure – from well-defined RDBMS to streaming text – and metadata.  Analyzing content to determine or infer metadata for unstructured or weakly documented data is a crucial step that facilitates the correlation and inference that underwrite insight.  Can you ‘crack the code’ and add the structure that reveals context?

Fourth, they will compete on delivering agile solutions that scale and govern to enterprise standards.  Well-understood and effectively provisioned, immediately visible, and enriched by metadata extraction, information is positioned to deliver insight – on demand or proactively through application views of customers, products, markets, and assets.  Winning solutions will incorporate existing security and governance protocols, support enterprise- or global audiences, and rely upon a single ‘universal catalog’ to deliver application results.  Do you have an innovation platform designed for delivering insight?

From Insight To Einstein

At Attivio, we’ve aligned our core deliverables to help you win each of these competitive challenges.  In our new semantic data catalog offering, we offer data and analytic professionals self-service tools for profiling, identifying, and unifying data sources that scale and are governed in enterprise-wide Hadoop clusters. We optimize the data supply chain that connects analysts and data managers around data they need, accelerating the provisioning of information for insight. 

Our Content Analytics offering supplies an enterprise-grade platform for extracting information from content – principally, but not exclusively, unstructured content that still holds insights about individual customers and markets alike.  The result is a single, universal catalog of every data table and source, suitable for the analysis and correlation that triggers insight.  With the right sources and their enriched information, our Search-based Applications deliver insight – on-demand and proactively to multiple use cases, from a common universal catalog.

Creating and maintaining enhanced views of your business is a proven path to achieving the insight that drives market leaders.  One hundred years ago, several insights prompted Einstein to re-write our understanding of physics.  Who can imagine what your new insights will create?