Cyril on Business Intelligence

We’ve explored why CRM and Competitive Intelligence isn’t shared in my previous blog post of October 9. A major contribution factor is that few people understand that soft information has metadata, just like the hard stuff. If you come here often you’ll know I’m a fan of BI oriented metadata repositories (to the foolish extent of creating a new one for BI analysts!).

Business analysts need a metadata repository for the soft stuff too, or at least they need to understand what they’re working with. Without this understanding you can’t distinguish between, and treat appropriately, one rumor on customer disaffection, a second opinion on the impact of new patent, or a third comment on what’s wrong with the new marketing campaign.

As with most abortive knowledge collaboration initiatives, enterprises usually do not address the underlying cultural factors inhibiting sharing. They simply rely on altruistic motivation: “It’s good for the company, so the teams will embrace it”.

Well, of course they won’t, or not often. “Altruism is a disease”, someone perspicacious once said (actually it was my PA when I was a Professor). Whatever the truth of this, good faith certainly is not a big motivator in a context where the staff members face potential downside when they open their mouths and blow the whistle on their boss, product, peers or whomever.

Let’s examine what soft (tacit) information actually is, and from whence it is usually derived. The metadata if you will. We can then move on to synthesize and prescribe design principles that encourage sharing knowledge, or at least ameliorate the cultural issues.

There are three categories of soft information in my experience. These form a basis of soft information metadata categorization:

Independent Items;

Comment, or Qualification, Items; and

Reference Items

Independent soft information exists in a “stand-alone”, hopefully self-explanatory, format and context; much like hard data objects such as customer names, ID codes, Product SKUs, Employee address, etc.

• Examples include: rumors, ideas, suggestions, proposals, news, web site content, knowledge created during meetings, results of informal “corridor” meetings, etc.
• These are often the most valuable BI items in a CRM or CI context, as they can portend a paradigm shift – say the disaffection of a major customer, or the rumored breakthrough features of a new competitive product.
• They often are discovered accidentally, and originate from unlikely sources. Therefore, they’re difficult to collect, assess and disseminate.
• Validation of their accuracy is always an issue, often relying on source identification to establish reliability.
• Without a formal effort to collect this valuable resource, the business is relying on serendipity. You may as well buy a ticket in the lottery.

Comment soft information items qualify other items of soft information or known facts.

• Examples include: assessments of a change in ordering pattern of a major customer, reasons why a market share has increased sharply, opinions on the validity of rumors about competitor marketing plans, evaluation of a forecast sales plan, possible solutions to a plant production problem, possible implications of an event – say the effect on sales and customer loyalty due to a fire in a production facility, etc.
• Clearly these items have no value without the context of the item they qualify.
• Knowledge is created as qualification assessments are made, and this know-how needs to be made explicit and managed so that the added value of the soft information is always retrievable whenever the main item is accessed (a non-trivial data management issue!). They are most valuable when they come from a known, designated, subject expert.
• Inadequate mobilization of this resource is inexcusable. The business knows not what the business knows – you’re condemned to meet and improperly deal with the same problems, over and over.

Reference soft information describes likely sources, and the quality of those sources, of other intelligence, hard and soft. These items are only as good as the reliability of the quality assessments of the sources. Essentially they embody the second part of Samuel Johnson’s famous adage:

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.”

Or more colloquially: “It’s who you know, not what you know, that counts.”

• Examples include: a list of URLs of “good” blogs on a topic, ranked lists of investment advisors, suggestions for better than average travel guides, etc.
• In the CRM and CI context, examples include lists of people with inside knowledge of customers and competitors, industry analysts, former sales representatives, relevant web sites, and useful publications on corporations, etc.
• This inventory of sources, and the quality and reliability of same, is clearly a vital information resource. But how many enterprises devote even minimal effort to it? Most rely on the goodwill and efforts of individuals, some of whom are inhibited by the cultural factors of my October 9 blog post.
• Reference items are particularly valuable for Drilldown in problem solving situations – see my blog post of August 27. They tell us, for example, who may know how serious the problem is and what happened last time it occurred.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that it’s worth doing something substantial to facilitate capture and dissemination of this forward looking business intelligence.

We have an understanding of the issues, both cultural and definitional. All we have to do is create requirements specification principles that embrace the positives and either ameliorate or circumnavigate the problems!

What does seem certain is that we can’t wait for the all sharing, all collaborating, Web 2 generation to come to our aid; they’re too busy in MySpace downloading and assessing music and videos and exposing their foibles to the world. The problem is now.

Thanks for sticking with me this far, Dear Reader. Enough of analysis: synthesis and prescription is where it’s at. We’ll have a go at synthesis next time.