Northern Light SinglePoint: Your Enterprise’s CI “Content Factory”

For all the excitement about generative AI (GenAI), in order for this new technology to be valuable in an enterprise knowledge management application – market and competitive intelligence (CI) research and analysis is a case in point – the user organization must first have a “content factory” in place.  A content factory is a critical foundation because the quality of GenAI output in a document search and summary use case like CI research is wholly dependent upon the quality of the content it draws upon.

Which is why, underlying our robust user and administrator functionality for insights search, mining, and distribution, Northern Light SinglePoint™ offers large enterprises an unsurpassed market and competitive intelligence content factory.

“Content factory” defined

What exactly is a “content factory”?  It’s a system that automatically ingests and then consistently tags and indexes documents from authorized internal and external sources into a single integrated, readily searchable content database. The factory operates continuously, adding content from all authorized sources on a regularly scheduled basis.  Manual uploading of documents by authorized personnel also is possible.

Operating a content factory entails a complex series of tasks.  In the market research and CI content factories that Northern Light builds and operates for its enterprise clients, Northern Light:

1. Aggregates the content by a variety of means from all authorized internal and external content suppliers – In some cases, the content is crawled with special vendor permission and firewall access; in some cases, there are FTP sites; in some cases, the content is transmitted to Northern Light other ways.  Each of the suppliers has a different means of transmitting the content to Northern Light, so individual processes have been created, must be continuously maintained, and are executed every day.
2. QAs the content delivery – Northern Light checks each vendor’s delivery against what should have been delivered.  While the vendors are supposed to make new content available each day as they publish it on their services, Northern Light routinely identifies hundreds of vendor delivery errors each year.
3. Filters the content to capture and normalize metadata – Each of the suppliers of content aggregated by the factory has a different set of conventions for representing document metadata.  Northern Light has a filter for each of the vendors that applies a common metadata structure to the documents before they are indexed.
4. Indexes the content – Northern Light indexes the documents and subject-classifies them using Northern Light proprietary tools and taxonomies designed for market intelligence search applications.  All content from external vendors is indexed and classified to a single consistent standard with metadata consistently applied.
5. Stores or discards the content – In most cases, the external vendors require that they retain the storage of the content and Northern Light discards its copy after indexing.  In a few cases, by vendor request, Northern Light hosts the content for those vendors.
6. Operates the search application for the content – Northern Light maintains a search engine and application suite developed specifically for searching premium vendor content in market research and competitive intelligence settings and which is particularly effective for users of such applications.
7. Authenticates the end users for content access – When a user requests to view a document, Northern Light authenticates that the user has been granted permission by their organization and the external content supplier to see the document, then logs the user into the authentication system of that vendor, fetches the document, and delivers it to the user’s browser window.  Northern Light maintains over 40 unique external vendor login processes to facilitate this procedure.

All of this is well beyond the capability of most corporate IT departments, so having a specialist like Northern Light running their CI content factory makes sense for many large enterprises.  At the same time, the desire to derive value from generative AI in the enterprise is testing the technology, operations and compliance leaders at virtually every large organization.  Those that have a content factory in place have a significant head start in putting GenAI to productive use and realizing tangible benefits in the near term.