Why large enterprises choose Northern Light SinglePoint as their market and competitive intelligence research platform

There are many considerations that go into selecting a knowledge management (KM) platform for a large enterprise’s market and competitive intelligence (CI) research.  Based on Northern Light’s over 20 years of experience working with the world’s foremost research-driven organizations, here’s some of what CI leaders within those companies tell us.

Consolidate all key information assets in one place

An enterprise-scale KM platform for CI must meet the needs of thousands of business researchers (end users) within an organization – in other words, it has to enable “self-service” access to CI documents – and also the needs of CI professionals responsible for delivering insights to all those users.  Not being able to quickly find the most relevant research and authoritative perspective needed to inform a business decision is the largest impediment professionals face when it comes to conducting CI activities.  So, market and competitive intelligence leaders prioritize the ability to gather all CI-related content, whether it’s generated internally or externally, in a single repository.  Content sources typically include market research reports produced by employees and contractors of the organization; reports from third-party market intelligence analysis services to which the organization subscribes; business and industry news; government databases; corporate financial reports; thought leader insights; and more.

But it’s not enough to simply aggregate all those documents; they must be indexed and tagged, deeply and consistently, so that information within them can be discovered with a single search query.  Northern Light automatically tags all documents with our 60,000-term taxonomy and the tags can be used to filter, navigate, and visualize the content.

Customize the user experience

Across an organization with many thousands of employees, each user knows what’s important to them, and each user is different.  Therefore, each user’s experience with the organization’s CI platform ideally should be as customized to their individual preferences as possible.  That includes what they see on their screen when they first enter the system, the latest content displayed from their priority sources, and the headlines and news digests related to the topics they care about.

Northern Light SinglePoint™ contains many features that can facilitate users customizing their environment to their personal interests.  For example, Northern Light’s recommendation engine (the Recommended Reading List) learns each user’s preferences for content and then starts proactively finding content the user should care about based on what the system has learned.  In addition, SinglePoint offers the capability to monitor and push content as RSS feeds and email alerts to individuals from internal and external sources that are personalized or created by subject matter experts on common topics.  And SinglePoint also provides a robust newsletter tool that is very successful at delivering breaking updates.

Automation in many forms, including generative AI, is a must

While still a new technology, generative AI is rapidly making inroads into enterprise applications, thanks in part to the technique of Retrieval Augmented Generation, which ensures  that material generated by the GenAI only draws from defined and vetted content, not a commercial large language model’s (LLMs) broad training set.  In SinglePoint, GenAI enables users to ask the system a direct question and receive a generated answer from the vetted content in the SinglePoint platform, rather than from questionable internet content.  All answers are cited, and the contributing documents are linked so the user can qualify the answer and download the document with a single mouse click.

But there’s a lot more automation built into SinglePoint than just GenAI; the machine learning capabilities mentioned above fall into this category.  In addition, new documents published by authorized content sources are automatically ingested and processed, so CI professionals (typically a small team of people, even in the world’s largest organizations) are not saddled with the mundane and repetitive task of manually uploading content into the platform; and competitor and topic dashboards are populated automatically with the latest content.

Select a partner whose support is as strong as their product

Northern Light strives to be the easiest company our enterprise clients have ever worked with, and they consistently tell us we are succeeding in that mission.  Northern Light has a high-touch support model working closely with a client’s portal admins, not only during a deployment but also ongoing throughout the relationship.  A Customer Success Team (CST) is assigned to the client and includes a Customer Success Manager (CSM), a Research Librarian, and a Content Operations Manager if secondary content is being integrated.  The CST meets regularly with client administrators to review status of open items, to discuss new editorial support like dashboard creation, review portal metrics, provide best practices advice, train, and plan new upgrades.  The CSM is never more than a phone call or email message away.

When large enterprises undertake an evaluation of knowledge management platforms for market and competitive intelligence, they invariably face a build or buy decision.  Because of the content management complexities associated with CI, corporate IT departments generally are not ideally suited to building this type of solution.  With its custom solution, easily customized for the needs of any complex organization – companies with multiple business units and product lines, operating in many geographies – Northern Light stands ready to deliver a fully operational platform within 90 days.