I spoke this morning to over 100 people, which isn’t news in itself, but you might be surprised when I tell you the topic. These good folks want to know about how content management, text analytics, and business intelligence are coming together. I expect to draw large crowds (often larger than this one) when I talk about Internet marketing, but this crowd wanted to know about the technical forces that are moving under the surface. This crowd is well-schooled in content management, but I hope that I was able to show them how content management is just part of what businesses need to solve some kinds of problems—text analytics (and text search) combined with business intelligence can augment content management to form a powerful solution to help typical business users, including Internet marketers.
As I explained to the audience, I was reluctant to show the normal where-the-rubber-meets-the-sky presentation depicting big clouds of technology converging on each other, full of “gee whiz” questions about what we can imagine comes in the future. No, I wanted to do something more practical.
So, I conjured up a scenario that combines content management, text analytics, and business intelligence, but uses these technologies exactly as they exist today. No invention required. What is required is all of us looking at these technologies as pieces to integrate rather than silos that must be managed by technical experts.
My scenario featured Dorothy, the marketing executive of a mid-sized telecom firm who is using technology to find out what the market is saying and to respond with an improved marketing campaign. Again, all the technology in the scenario exists, but it isn’t integrated in such a way to make this possible today. If you’re interested, you can download the scenario from my talk on the convergence of ECM, text analytics, and BI.
After the talk, I got a good question: “Is OLAP still needed?” Frankly I hope no one gets the idea from my scenario that business intelligence experts won’t still be needed—they will. All I am trying to do is point out that we should reserve them for things only they can do, freeing up the information from requiring expertise to perform simpler tasks.
If you’re an Internet marketer, I hope that you’ll benefit from the type of system I showed in the scenario someday. Someday soon, I hope.
