Michael MaozThe 18 presentations that need to be brought to editing for our upcoming conference, Gartner Customer 360 Summit (http://bit.ly/wBQyzi) are now safely behind me, as are the case studies. More immediately ahead is today’s Gartner Webcast ( http://bit.ly/zjtcIY ) that looks at “Using Insight to Create Customer Centricity.” If you have time at noon EST, listen in. We have about 600 people signed up, and we’ll be Tweeting and doing a Q/A as well.
During the preparation for the Webcast there was a deep discussion about the role of data, and how it is refined into information, which in turn is further distilled into true knowledge, served in a form useful to a customer or someone in sales, marketing, logistics and/or customer support. It took me back to something that Isaiah Berlin said in his definition of ‘judgment,’ and in his case he was speaking of political judgment. But it applies more broadly to the challenge for the enterprise:
Judgment is ‘a capacity for integrating, multicolored, evanescent perpetually overlapping data.’
And whether you are a CIO or the head of Customer Care, you can feel this in your bones. Data is flowing in from QR codes and embedded devices and NFC and mobile phones and the website and from community and from internal sources. How do we create sense out of what can feel inchoate and chaotic? How do we filter out the extraneous bits from the vital bytes that could mean business insight? How do we neutralise for bias? How do we achieve understanding on a semantic level and a business-outcome level?
At Gartner we continue to focus on the Intent Driven Enterprise, or building a business (or university, or government!) where antennae are always listening, contextually, for meaning and opportunity and intent. And then that is mapped to the enterprise intent for that group, segment, or individual. From there we build out knowledge. Gathering the data that is required to get to insight is only possible when there is a sense of what outcomes we want. How do those DNA strands sequence themselves just so A-C-T-C, dideoxynucleotides lining up and forming that perfect you? We kind of know now, but it was a mystery for a long time.
Václav Havel, who left us one month ago today, was once asked how did a group of students and dissidents manage to achieve what they had in the Velvet Revolution. What he said was, “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.” That perfectly heuristic approach of thinking, taking action, repairing and improving, and moving forward, is what every CIO wants to happen in the enterprise. It is what each of us wants as a human being. It makes sense.
Turning these ideas on data – information – knowledge – action is what it is all about. If you happen to be a Gartner client and want to see what the team I am a part of is writing about in this area, you can check out what I published this morning: http://bit.ly/yj6w1I. We’ll be drilling into all of the issues around customer engagement and experience from every relevant angle.
See you soon in Orlando, and as always: thanks for the kind emails.
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