Cyril on Business Intelligence

A picture may be worth a thousand words, a news item also has about a thousand and a marketing strategic plan may have around five thousand. OK, but a great idea for a new marketing message, an expert’s adverse comment on the marketing plan, or a chance serendipitous airplane conversation about a competitor’s plans may be each worth a million dollars, for just a few hundred words. What do you want, words or dollars?

I believe there is far too much emphasis on the analysis of documented unstructured information as a BI resource. The basic important data just isn’t there for most businesses. You can search as long as you like; mine it, categorize it, summarize it, but to no avail, the well is dry.

This post follows on from my earlier, definitional, piece on this subject.

Of course, I recognize there is potential import in some written material, for example, recent emails, salesperson call reports, customer complaints and their ilk. But these are like seeds, rather than the fruit off the tree. They are the beginning of a BI story, not the whole enchilada.

At risk of making the discussion too deep, Dear Reader, I think we need to consider the basic concepts before coming to any conclusions about how a corporation should manage its unstructured data, and the tools required.

I find it valuable to characterize unstructured information with a 2 x 3 matrix.

The horizontal axis has the above two basic categories of unstructured information:

Explicit unstructured items are those that are basically unformatted, but have a physical, computable, presence; e.g. documents, pictures, emails, graphs, etc.

Tacit items are basically anything unformatted that is not explicit, they’re still in the minds of professionals and managers, but are nonetheless both real and vital; e.g. mental models, ideas, rumors, phone calls, opinions, verbal commentary, etc.

The vertical axis has the three categories of unstructured information (according to moi!): independent, qualification and reference items.

Independent items stand alone being self-explanatory in the first instance, not requiring reference to other pieces of information, be they structured, unstructured, explicit or tacit.

Qualification items have an adjectival quality, since they add value to other items (structured or unstructured), but are therefore relatively useless without reference to the appropriate one or more Independent or other Qualification items (note there may be one or more threads to a discussion based on an Independent item)

Reference items are pointers to subject experts who can provide details or opinions, and other sources of information, structured or unstructured, together with quality assessments of the value, reliability and timeliness of those sources. As Samuel Johnson said “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it”.

Here’s a descriptive tabulation.

	Explicit	Tacit
Independent, stand alone items	Meeting minutes News items Analyst reports Marketing call reports Legal judgments Proposals Government regulations Suggestion box items Customer complaints Strategic plans Manuals of best practice Emails about new issues or competitive intelligence	Unrecorded meeting discussions Ideas Suggestions (undocumented) Potential problems Know-how Competitive intelligence from informal customer/industry contacts Stock market (racehorse) tip Rumors Intuitions Off-the-record talks with government officers
Qualification, commentary items	Written comments on a report/news/analyst item Documented opinion on problem or situation Formal assessments of status implications	Verbal comments on a report/news/analyst item Verbal comments on emails Verbal opinions on problems Verbal assessments of issues Possible solution options Comments on a rumor
Reference, source quality items	Lists of subject experts Ratings of experts Document sources, catalogs Written reviews of document sources	Unrecorded subject expert identity Opinions on expert quality People who “know-how” Informal unrecorded information source documents Assessments of document source utility

Ask yourself, Dear Reader, which of these cells contains high value information, likely to assist your corporate executives find problems and make decisions? If they’re only on the explicit side, then you’re in the sights of UIMA and lots of enthusiastic vendors; good luck. If some are on the tacit side, please read on.

I’ve covered several of the relevant aspects of managing tacit information in earlier posts, e.g. here and here. However, there are some additional relevant observations to be made in the tacit versus explicit context.

• The first, possibly most important, observation is apparently self-defeating to my thesis. All important, currently relevant, items of tacit unstructured information should be made explicit as soon as practicable.
• It is not possible to identify, collect, store, disseminate, and facilitate collaboration on purely tacit items; it will happen in a “same time” meeting, of course, but wider ramifications demand that the prelude and/or outcome be made explicit.
• Independent intelligence items, be they initially explicit (e.g. a recent email) or tacit, are very rarely complete as regards background to the issue, its importance to the business, its time criticality, and assessments of potential impact. If you will, the knowledge has not yet been created, only its seed.
• The information required to complete the knowledge building that starts with an Independent Item is rarely in one location or person’s mind.
• The knowledge building is based mostly on tacit information
• The knowledge building process is most effective if performed via collaboration between the people who have, or know where to find, the necessary Qualification Items of information.
• Some process for collaboration audience selection is required, one based on issue content, criticality and importance. It shouldn’t be left to pure chance.
• Desirably, the collaboration process, but certainly the end result, should be made explicit, to avoid resolving the same issue many times over.

In my previous post I offered some questions that might provoke your curiosity, Dear Reader

1. What are the most useful sources of unstructured information in our business? Are they Explicit or Tacit?
2. If Explicit, how do we best marshal the information and report it?
3. If Tacit, ditto?
4. Is the information we get from our unstructured sources complete, and ready for promulgation, or do we need to amplify or build on it before it’s useful?

I expect that you will be able to answer 1 and 4 for your business; I’ve outlined the issues as best I can.

I’ll defer offering pointers you might consider for 2 and 3 to the next post, because I believe we still need to revisit the processes and constraints that inhabit the strange corporate world of collaborative knowledge building.