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Apr

2012

Unstructured data: Challenge or asset?

"Big data, unstructured data, semi-structured data. Data is all over the technology news, and for good reason. It is overwhelming most organizations; requiring new ways to operate to stay competitive; helping to serve customers better; and bringing new products to market faster. "

www.zdnet.com/...6356681

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bigdata unstructureddatas customers customerservice customerinsight insights customercentricity data knowledge knowledgecapital

According to a recent IBM Survey of 1,500 CEOs, a staggering number of CEOs describe their organizations as data rich, but Insight poor and voice frustration at not being able to transform available data into feasible action plans, let alone detect emerging opportunities.
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- Particularly disturbing is the inability of companies to effectively manage customer information coming from social media as well as enterprise systems. A recent Coveo survey of 100 customer service executives showed that 85 percent believe their management of unstructured content will determine how effectively and efficiently they’ll be able to serve customers in the future.
- The movement to customer-centric operations—made essential by the vast choices open to consumers and B2B buyers – requires all departments to draw insight from customer information in disparate sources and to share their findings with other areas
- Organizations may confuse data, information and knowledge. Data is useless unless combined with other data to create information. Knowledge is the human capacity to take action facing a complex situation. Collective knowledge is often the most important asset of an organization, which is why it can be referred to it as Knowledge Capital.
- This ability to gain the necessary knowledge to face a complex situation is accomplished by: a) quickly re-assembling the relevant information from all sources and b) identifying the people who possess the knowledge
- Legacy technology to handle unstructured data often attempts to consolidate the data by moving the data into a “system of record,
- The initial challenges with this strategy are summarized here, however the challenges are multiple. Mercurial, unstructured data:
  1. Is unavailable to users during the time it is being curated
  2. Quickly becomes outdated
  3. Continues to proliferate outside of the system of knowledge
- Importantly, the newly “structured,” unstructured data must be presented in interfaces that facilitate human interaction: allowing employees, customers and partners to navigate and make sense of it,
- Fundamentally, time has a direct impact on the cost structure of an organization. If agents, for example, spend too much time solving issues, it has a direct impact on cost
- From an ROI perspective, it’s straightforward. Better access to consolidated, correlated, unstructured data can cut time spent in knowledge-driven activities in half. If 50 percent of a company’s call center time is spent on knowledge-driven activities and the company spends $100 million per year on the call center, at least $50 million of the budget is associated with people spending time trying to figure out answers to problems. Slashing that time in half saves the company $25 million per year.

Feb

2012

2012: The Year Analytics Means Business

"The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation."

timoelliott.com/...-analytics-means-business.html

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b bigdata businessmodel customerservice risk bottlenecks analytics bi innovation insights unstructureddatas

Analytics technology has been changing fast. On the back end, new technologies have come together to provide what Gartner calls “extreme data performance”. These include in-memory, column data stores, in-database calculations, massively parallel architectures, complex event processing, Big Data / NoSQL / Hadoop, and cloud architectures.
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- And on the front end, various technologies are coming together to provide unprecedented levels of context-based “actionable insights”, including self-service data discovery, advanced visualization including maps, mobile analytics, predictive analytics, collaborative decision-support. They help provide more action-oriented interfaces optimized for the context of the users, both inside and outside the organization.
- University researchers have pointed out that today’s management techniques are based on the limitations of information scarcity:
- with access to the finest granularities of information, management will be able to move freely from macro to micro levels and will be able to measure, plan and act accordingly. With increased resolution come more options to drill down, eliminate inefficiencies and cut costs
- New forms of data: ‘unstructured’ data such as text has long been difficult to effectively analyze and incorporate into mainstream corporate analytics. The new systems make it much easier for companies like Medtronic to access and analyze the large amount of complaints and feedback data they receive about their products, combine it with other data sources, and provide it to business users with dynamic interfaces:

Aug

2011

Adding Social Elements to Intranet? Don't Forget Change Management | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com

"Organizations adding social elements to their intranets are finding that doing so creates new opportunities for collaboration. When I spoke to Jack MacKay, CIO of the American Hospital Association, he told me the AHA lists the key initiatives of its 13 business units along with how they tie into the AHA's central strategic plan. The result is "a direct line of sight" into projects that makes it easier to track them and identify possible areas for improvement. And as MacKay said, "As people become more aware of activities of other departments, they start seeing opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration.""

www.itbusinessedge.com/...-dont-forget-change-management

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intranet socialintranet changemanagement change intranet2.0 casestudies Americanhostpialassociation socialnetwork observablework insights

Organizations adding social elements to their intranets are finding that doing so creates new opportunities for collaboration. When I spoke to Jack MacKay, CIO of the American Hospital Association, he told me the AHA lists the key initiatives of its 13 business units along with how they tie into the AHA's central strategic plan. The result is "a direct line of sight" into projects that makes it easier to track them and identify possible areas for improvement. And as MacKay said, "As people become more aware of activities of other departments, they start seeing opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration."
Social networks among workers. As Hinchcliffe notes, networks usually feature rich user profiles that maintain an employee's connections to their colleagues and often employ updates and live work streams. By using search tools and querying connections, folks can readily find coworkers with relevant expertise.
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- Observable work. Openly sharing projects, tasks, documents and discussions exposes the collective intelligence that is largely unseen at most organizations, again making it easier for folks to find information they need.
- Insights and analysis. This is the most nascent, yet most important, area for achieving a return on investment,
- As with any technology-enabled initiative, change management can make or break a social intranet. Change management must go beyond simply changing the behavior of individual workers to making broader organizational changes needed to support a more open and participative culture,
- Make social tools relevant to the way folks get their work done. As Ward told me, that means integrating them into the intranet home page and email. And help folks make the transition by sending email with links to relevant discussions on the intranet
- Get business leaders front and center. Ward says the most successful intranets he's seen involve a joint ownership structure in which IT owns the underlying technology and a group like communications or HR owns the interface and the structure.
- Customize where needed. Ward suggested starting with off-the-shelf software and then customizing. He said: "Most organizations won’t want to use SharePoint right out of the box. Your organization is not like your competition’s. You have your own unique culture and processes, and your homepage and your information architecture should reflect that uniqueness."
- Recruit a top executive. This tip is so important, I recently devoted an entire blog post to it.

Feb

2011

“What is Content Analytics?, Alex”

"“The technology behind Watson represents the future of data management and analytics. In the real world, this technology will help us uncover insights in everything from traffic to healthcare.”

- John Cohn, IBM Fellow, IBM Systems and Technology Group

How can the same technology used to play Jeopardy! give you better business insight?"

craigrhinehart.wordpress.com/...ontent-analytics-alex%E2%80%9D

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IBM watson insights questionanswering machine contentanalytics analytics languageware naturallanguageprocessing healthcare customersatisfaction customerservice

By combining advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and DeepQA automatic question answering technology, Watson represents the future of content and data management, analytics, and systems design. IBM Watson leverages core content analysis, along with a number of other advanced technologies, to arrive at a single, precise answer within a very short period of time.
Amazingly, Watson works like the human brain to analyze the content of a Jeopardy! question. First, it tries to understand the question to determine what is being asked. In doing so, it first needs to analyze the natural language text. Next, it tries to find reasoned answers, by analyzing a wide variety of disparate content mostly in the form of natural language documents. Finally, Watson assesses and determines the relative likelihood that the answers found, are correct based on a confidence rating.
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- I am not talking about search here. This is far beyond what search tools can do. A recent Forrester report, Take Control Of Your Content, states that 45% of the US workforce spends three or more hours a week just searching for information
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be leveraged in any situation where text is involved. Besides answering questions, it can help improve enterprise search results or even develop an understanding of the insight hidden in the content itsel
- The same core NLP technology used in Watson is available now to deliver business value today by unlocking the insights trapped in the massive amounts of unstructured information in the many systems and formats you have today. Understanding the content, context and value of this unstructured information presents an enormous opportunity for your business.
- companies like Hertz can drive new marketing campaigns or modify their products and services to meet the demands of their customers. “Hertz gathers an amazing amount of customer insight daily, including thousands of comments from web surveys, emails and text messages. We wanted to leverage this insight at both the strategic level and the local level to drive operational improvements

Dec

2010

From clients to processes. The marriage between Social CRM and Adaptive Case Management

"As some have correctly pointed out commenting on the recent post on Social Business, despite the potential of the path that more and more organizations have undertaken, the complexity of this ongoing change should not be underestimated. While not claiming to already have all the answers, I will share some reflections on the possible direction I see ahead."

www.socialenterprise.it/...m-and-adaptive-case-management

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socialcrm crm adaptivecasemanagement customerexperience socialbusiness adaptiveprocesses continuousimprovement processes conversations insights actions segmentation

how an organization conceptually and operationally can intercept, understand, process and transform external signals into a seamless mechanism to improve both processes and outcomes
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- The model relies on three phases of use of external signals: conversations, insights and actions
- From conversations to insights. Through the filtering, each individual message is placed in context in terms of the weight of its author (relevance), the extent of his network (reach), the number of times that similar messages were recorded (frequency), the potential impact it can have on the business (here is a manual tagging).
- From insights to continuous improvement. Beyond the individual actions that can be implemented through business rules, there are two major areas of response: The pseudo-manual 1-to-1 response and the potential improvement of the process.
- This is the realm of Adaptive Case Management , an approach aimed at enabling business users to design their own (without involving developers, web services, IT) templates of actions (the cases) during their normal activities.
- From adaptive improvement to the optimization of core processes. Finally, in some cases, the improvement involves one of the central processes that automate the operations of the business
- Separating the emergent level from the strictly procedural top-down approach allows you to provide more flexibility for individuals but especially more responsiveness and lower costs to the company, given that putting your hands on BPM is a bit like developing a new application with all the steps and time needed for requirements analysis, design, development, testing, etc..