NEWS ANALYSIS: ITEM

			Intelligent Intelligence: How Search Technology is Creating New Market Intelligence Content
			John Blossom
			21 June 2004
SUMMARY:			Market intelligence used to be all about focus groups, phone banks and sifting through field reports from salespeople. Now with tools from companies such as FAST Search & Transfer, Moreover in partnership with Biz360 and Factiva getting the pulse of human insight and sentiment is becoming a much more scientific and efficient endeavor. In the process of creating systems that generate "intelligent intelligence", though, a new class of content is being created that owes little to established publishers and everything to a new generation of technology that's extracting human value instead of just data from unstructured sources. It's not as relaxing as chatting around the water cooler but it sure is more rewarding.

Call it Business Intelligence, call it Market Intelligence or Competitive Intelligence - whatever the name of these overlapping disciplines, one of the key requirements for businesses is to be on top of the events and opinions in the competitive circles that comprise their business environment. Having unique insights into these circles can offer first mover opportunities - or a chance to head for the exits before it's too late. With increasingly sophisticated enterprise portal environments that collect structured and unstructured content from all kinds of internal niches via search engines and related content analysis tools, business intelligence from internal sources as well as from external premium and open Web sources is being combined into a rich tapestry of insights that can drive business decisions via programming and interfaces producing content that's much more - well, intelligent.

Factiva's Reputation Management initiative has gained a good deal of the spotlight in this "intelligent intelligence" arena to date, but the ring is starting to get much more crowded. There have been a number of announcements leading vendors supporting business intelligence initiatives: FAST Search & Transfer announced its new Marketrac solution that leverages its core search technology along with advanced content analysis to Interpret attitudes, satisfaction, or sentiment, identify potential threats or opportunities -- in real-time and gauge commitment, intention, or motivation buried in content already available to an institution.  The focus on FAST's implementation is on enterprise and Web content, while Moreover Technologies' recently announced alliance with Biz360 is generating similar inferences for brand management from the perspective of broadcast, print and online published content. In both these packages and Factiva's the emphasis is on easy-to-understand analytics for senior management to understand how opinions and outlooks are shaping their business environment. Other vendors such a ClearForest, anacubis and Inxight provide more solutions to such business problems as well in a more general framework.

Thanks to the language analytics that make this kind of automated insight possible a whole new class of content is coming into being. With earlier generations of search technology the emphasis was on offering smaller haystacks in which to search for needles - hopefully close to the top of the stack, but with no guarantees. With these kinds of content analysis tools the search metaphor is secondary to using those needles, regardless of their location, to sew together an interesting tapestry of unique information that can be applied to a specific client's needs as readily as any consultant's report with far less hassle and long-term expense.

This kind of ad hoc content generation to tailored specifications and needs with a minimum of custom development intervention is a vContent play of the highest order. What are some of the bigger implications of "intelligent intelligence" content-generating applications to consider? Here are a few of our thoughts:

• The rise of nuance management. The complexities of creating content value out of search engines and related technologies such as categorization tools have all centered around trying to give structure to content sets that are oftentimes inherently difficult to put into meaningful systems of content organization. This science of traditional content organization will continue to improve, but the science of looking at patterns in text content for their own sake seems to be developing at a much more rapid rate these days - thanks in part to post-9/11 paranoia as a priming force but now taking on a life of its own as businesses begin to take advantage of language science more effectively. With far less time and opportunity in today's corporate environment for people to share their insights around real water coolers, the ability to mine virtual water coolers for the shaded and nuanced views of what makes a market tick are becoming a far more important strategic tool.
• Text enters the world of analytics. Using software to analyze content and derive new layers of content value is old hat for number-crunching analysts on Wall Street used to taking in financial information from the far corners of the earth and feeding it into complex financial models. Content extraction used to mean pulling out words and numbers that could be placed in database fields and brushed up for quantitative content uses. Now language processing tools offer people the ability to bypass that kind of static representation of extracted value and to create a far more organic analytic framework that much more closely approximates what humans really think and do with one another. Instead of having to strip value out of text "intelligent intelligence" tools value its most "messy" context as the source of its value - a capability that plays into many of today's leading sources of content, such as Weblogs and instant messaging. Instead of "unstructured" content being a liability, it is becoming a rich and irreplaceable asset.
• Anyone can play this game.  It's good to see companies like Factiva and Moreover trying to leverage their substantial assets in this new game, but as FAST and Biz360 are showing, it's a game that doesn't necessarily play strongly into the hands of companies catering to publishers who are more interested in creating the nuances of text than in exploiting them. In the New Aggregation, whoever is willing to look at text as text, with business terms for its use as a very secondary concern, is likely to be an ultimate winner in this sphere of "intelligent intelligence."

Gearing up one's business to maximize the value of content for audiences in specific venues regardless of how a content source may view its value is a cornerstone of success for vContent providers, a capability that is being exploited to its maximum with these market intelligence tools.  In the past this has meant extracting and eliminating human value, but in today's marketplace it means an increasing focus on consolidating and enhancing content's human value in new and exciting ways. Call it what you will, it all boils down to a great opportunity for redefining how valuable content is created and marketed. If you're intelligent enough to handle it.

- John Blossom

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