Garth Wittles is district manager for Verity South Africa. He has over a decade's experience in the IT sector, having helped pioneer workflow, document management and knowledge management in SA.
Unstructured data offers store of untapped BI value
Traditional BI vendors agree that clean data is essential to analysis and reporting. But organisations are losing a huge amount of information if they rigidly apply this approach to data gathering and analysis.
Taxonomies can uncover a wealth of knowledge, but taxonomies and classification can only deliver benefits if they organise information the way people use it.
Social networks are all around us. People interact with each other, information is shared and recommended from person to person, and communities of interest grow and ebb as priorities and projects change.
The typical organisation manages its intellectual capital inside an increasing number of repositories, including e-mail, content management systems, databases, employees` hard drives, centralised storage devices and proprietary applications.
Companies should utilise knowledge-enabled customer relationship management systems to ensure better understanding, increased value and improved customer relationships.
Do your product category managers have the tools they need to promote, cross-sell and up-sell online? Does your Web site personalise the shopping experience at the individual level? Does your online channel enable your offline channels, and vice versa?