Northern Light SinglePoint users are equipped to become “IKN transformers”

Industry research firm IDC has coined a term for organizations that “holistically collect and capture information from a large number of sources across the enterprise, use advanced tools and technologies to synthesize and share that knowledge and exhibit a company culture that promotes knowledge sharing… resulting in increases in productivity and better returns on investment.” IDC labels such organizations intelligent knowledge network (IKN) transformers.

Sounds like something we’d all like to be, right?  After all, what enterprise wouldn’t want to leverage all its knowledge assets in service of achieving its business goals?

Let’s consider how Northern Light SinglePoint™ equips an organization to become an IKN transformer.

For starters, take the “collect and capture information” aspect of IDC’s definition.  SinglePoint is designed to break down content silos, those nasty barriers to locating and sharing valuable information that often exist within enterprises due to a combination of factors: the use of Microsoft SharePoint and personal laptop computers for document storage, and the unique publishing systems employed by third-party producers of market research and industry analysis that many organizations license.  SinglePoint solves these problems by creating one searchable, consistently tagged and indexed repository of all of an organization’s internally-generated and licensed third-party content.

To be clear, not every organization can do this effectively (either on its own or through a commercial portal vendor) because it requires:

• Content publishing industry awareness, contacts, and aggregation solutions;
• The ability to use any aggregation technique, to do it the way each content publisher wants it done; and
• An understanding of and the technical ability to ensure both licensing compliance and copyright compliance.

Next, let’s consider the use of “advanced tools and technologies to synthesize knowledge”.  Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-based machine learning, SinglePoint automatically summarizes the most significant ideas contained in the documents on a search result into an easily digestible “Insights Report”.  Beyond that, SinglePoint learns what a user is interested in based on what they download, then (using semantic modeling) recommends content to the user, creating an AI-generated “Recommended Reading List”.

Finally, IDC’s definition specifies the use of “advanced tools and technologies to share knowledge” across an enterprise – what Northern Light calls an insight distribution ecosystem.  This is an AI-enabled infrastructure that directs relevant 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, RSS, and more.

Strategic dashboards present curated topical content collections to users who prefer to browse to content.  Dashboards can present an entire story to a user in a convenient visual that allows the user to drill down on any element of particular interest.  A strategic dashboard may contain featured market research reports, analytics on related strategy issues, videos and content streams on relevant topics, downloadable PowerPoint presentations with rotating slides, as well as links to additional information.

Dashboards and newsletters work hand-in-hand.  In one case, a Northern Light client coordinates dashboards and newsletter strategies and distributes over 20,000 pieces of market intelligence a month to global staff members.

So, if your organization aspires to be an IKN transformer – or already is one, and wants to get even better – consider how a SinglePoint portal can put you on (or propel you further down) the path.

To learn more about how SinglePoint can enable your organization to become an “IKN transformer”, contact Northern Light.