Avoid the “laptop death trap” for primary research

We were demonstrating Northern Light SinglePoint™ to a prospective client the other day; she is the Insights and Global Innovation Manager at an international food and agricultural products company.  In evaluating market and competitive intelligence portal solutions, she described her mission as being to “free up and unlock” the company’s research assets, noting that primary research in particular often is “trapped on laptops and dies on the vine.”  Microsoft SharePoint sites are no better, because they can be created by anyone, anywhere in the organization and there is no centralized, coordinated way to track what research documents are filed in which SharePoint library.

These are problems we hear frequently from prospects, which SinglePoint is uniquely able to address.  Because not only does SinglePoint offer an integrated research content repository for the enterprise – one place to access all primary and licensed secondary research content, business news, and industry databases – it also contains a primary research workflow management tool to streamline the process by which primary research content is created.  So with SinglePoint, no research disappears on individuals’ laptop computers; instead, it resides in the portal, where it is indexed, tagged, and findable by all employees with access rights to any given document.

Even better, with SinglePoint, content can find users, rather than putting the onus on users to find content.  That’s because SinglePoint comes with an insights distribution ecosystem – an infrastructure that directs relevant competitive intelligence content and insights to the individuals who need it, in a timely manner, via whatever medium or mechanism those individuals prefer, automatically.  Options include strategic dashboards, search results, newsletters, machine learning-driven recommendations and insights reports, email alerts, and RSS feeds.

The goal of an insight distribution ecosystem is to maximize consumption of content by those who can put it to best use.  The precise composition and structure of any given organization’s insight distribution ecosystem will be unique to that enterprise, based on the information requirements and preferences of key constituencies within it.

Now, back to our prospect – she was impressed with not only the “findability” of every piece of research content within a portal, but also with SinglePoint’s AI-driven machine learning capabilities that present meaningful insights from each document contained in a search result in digest form.  The machine reads the documents in the search result and creates a report that distills the key insights and major competitive and market developments.

With SinglePoint, occasional users learn more from reading the insights report than they do by engaging in the traditional search process of scanning search results and picking one document to download and read.  Power researchers save time by reading the report to learn what the major issues are before going to the search results to drill into key topics.

All of this happens inside of an AI-fueled continuous improvement feedback loop. Machine-learning monitors how users interact with search results and adjusts what the system proactively brings to each individual’s attention based on their preferences and behavior.

At the end of her SinglePoint demo, our prospect came away with a clear understanding of the value of an integrated enterprise research repository accessible through a portal optimized for market and competitive intelligence – and a solution to her “laptop death trap” problem.