Continuing the theme of books that have implications for meaning extraction, this post comments upon On Being Certain by Robert Burton, M.D. Burton is the associate chief of the Department of Neurosciences at Mt. Zion- University of California Hospital. (His website is rburton.com.)
Northern Light Strategic Research Portals
(617) 674-207410 Canal Park
Cambridge MA 02141
CEO Blog: In-Depth Understanding
On Intelligence: Lessons for Meaning Extraction
One of the books that inspired my thinking on meaning extraction was On Intelligence by one of Silicon Valley’s most successful computer architects, Jeff Hawkins, and highly-regarded science writer Sandra Blakeslee. Hawkins founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute to study memory and cognition, but he is not just an academician doing brain research. Rather, he is a substantial practitioner, being the CTO of palmOne and counting the creation of the PalmPilot among his accomplishments. I am always attracted to those persons that not only think a lot about a problem, but who then solve the myriad of practical problems required to translate those thoughts into devices and processes out here in the concrete reality. (A colleague recently described me as a “poster boy for pragmatism.”)
8 Risks of Managing Licensed Content Across an Enterprise
Over the years, I’ve spoken and written frequently about the challenges of managing and extracting maximum value from licensed market research across an enterprise. It’s a complicated (and potentially risky) endeavor – especially when content from multiple third-party publishers is involved, which is typically the case at global, research-driven organizations. My latest on this topic is posted at AIIM president John Mancini’s “Digital Landfill” blog — http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2010/06/index.html. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Software as a Service to the Rescue – Part 2: Complexities of Document Level Security
Corporate IT groups are no strangers to designing and enforcing enterprise data security regimens – but the type of security required for a strategic research portal incorporating licensed content from third-party publishers is a whole different ballgame. It’s one of the reasons a Software as a Service-based portal solution is so appealing to many large organizations.
SaaS to the Rescue – Part 1: Interfacing to Third-Party Publishers
Corporate IT groups are very good at a lot of things, but developing and managing systems that deal with external content repositories – especially valuable research content licensed from third-party providers on anything less than an enterprise-wide basis – isn’t one of them. That’s why a SaaS-based “portal” solution for “strategic research” such as market research, competitive intelligence, product development, and technology research makes good sense, resulting in some of the world’s largest research-driven companies choosing to go that route.
Why Search Is the Wrong Answer To the Wrong Problem
Search is the enterprise application that suffers the most from reinvention of the wheel. While you are researching a business opportunity, competitive development, or market event using a search engine, other people in your company are probably repeating the same search. They may be in an office near you, on another floor of the building, across the corporate campus, or in a business unit on another continent. There is no greater loss productivity from any enterprise application than in the search process when many times each day employees in different locations, divisions, and product groups of the same company, unbeknownst to each other, search their enterprise repositories and licensed market intelligence information for the same (or closely related) pieces of information. The search engine industry has even institutionalized this problem, making it a “feature not a bug,” by popularizing notions such as “most popular queries.” Think about it, most popular queries? How again is it good that same query is repeated over and over?
Beyond Sentiment Scoring
There are times I think the text analytics industry has painted itself into a corner with sentiment scoring. Not too long ago I attended an industry event in which every provider of text analytics that presented talked about how their solution could do sentiment scoring, and also a few other things. Speaker after speaker, I thought the “few other things” mentioned in passing were way more useful than sentiment scoring. But the speakers appeared to feel that sentiment scoring was what text analytics is about, at least from a PR and marketing perspective.
Innovation and Customer Insight
In April, my old employer, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and BusinessWeek released a study indentifying the most innovative global companies. The report is based on a survey by BCG of 2,700 senior executives “representing all major markets and industries.” Of even more interest is the research report published by BCG detaling the survey’s complete findings . (I will provide links to both the BusinessWeek article and the BCG research report at end of the this blog post.) The research report gives considerable more depth on questions like why a company would want to be an innovator, what degree of importance enterprises ascribe to innovation, what the actual contributions are to operating performance of innovation, and what factors facilitate innovation?
How To Save $50 million
Woody Allen is famously reported to have said, “80% of success is showing up.” Well, there is something about the ROI for a strategic research portal that is analogous. By simply concentrating all of a company’s market research in one repository that is available to everyone involved in strategic business or product research, huge benefits can be realized without a lot of fuss.
Copyright © 1996 - 2011, Northern Light Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.