Information Mining & Data Warehousing
In order to create actionable intelligence it needs material such as data and information from all internal and external resources. Market reports, field studies, industry summaries, sales force customer call intelligence and many other sources can be set to work. It pays to create a thorough plan in order to know and share the in’s and out’s and the whereabouts of all intelligence substance.
Scouring sources – Have your market experts, sales force, legal department and financial gurus scour their sources for you. Also, a great resource for past, current and future information sources is any merger and acquisition activity. Having a whole M&S team in place helps dramatically, only: those are a rather tight-lipped bunch. So you’ll have to budget for some dinner treats or Lakers tickets. Your most valuable information source by far though is your very own sales force. To be treated as your best buddies! Once they’ll find out what’s “in it” for them (you will need to deliver fairly quickly after starting your intelligence operation) a certain two-way dynamic could develop to feed the intelligence system and the sales force’s motivation. Remember: good intelligence gives sales reps solid reasons for customer calls.
Monitoring environments – Not watching what’s going on around you is impossible. Even if unconsciously: you ALWAYS notice change, steadiness, and stagnation or there might be a serious chance you have died already. Jokes aside: make it a habit for anyone involved in intelligence and information services, sales, field operations, marketing, supply & demand and any other observing group: to monitor and record the observations. Of course you don’t want to put a huge administrative burden onto the teams, so focus on the gossipy folks and whomever is supposed to gather such noise professionally anyway (using and feeding CRM systems, interacting with legacy systems and reporting features across the organization, etc.).
Collecting via internal channels – The Internet plays an important role in both availability and efficiency if it comes to finding information. As a word of caution though here are two areas of danger: you can easily get carried away and second: too much around. So, you’ll need manual help, great portals or both. Some intelligence services offer their own condensed versions or information offers. Other solutions might be possible utilizing feeds via XML protocols or RSS and the likes.
Adjust feed and storage quality, quantity – After such data and information feeds, as mentioned one paragraph above, have been put to use it might be important to make them more efficient, carve out the useless and challenge the quality in field tests. Put your sales force and marketers and other decision leaders to work in pilot phases and you will quickly learn about the value of all available streams and feeds. There is no need to store and mine data and information of less value, concentrate on the favorites for a while and you will realize what to ignore and scrape.
Author: Jens Thieme