What’s in a name?
This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.
Imagine the situation. You are setting up a new business, you need a name for the brand; one that makes sense, describes what you do and one that you can get the domain name for. That’s the position that we were in a couple of years ago. We wanted to call the business Applied Insights and luckily enough we were able to get an available domain name as well.
Why Applied Insights?
Well, we see it as one of the challenges facing businesses today. How do you get all this data to actually work for you? How do you translate the creation of ‘insight’ into actionable outcomes?
In his seminal work on web metrics and web analytics Jim Sterne described what he called ‘The feedback loop gap’. He was highlighting the problems with interpretation of data into real insight.
I think that there is also another gap; ‘The capability gap’
I think this gap is where an organisation lacks the ability to turn insight into action. This may exist for a number of reasons, for example:
- Insight isn’t really valued within the organisation and is seen as a justification for past actions rather than as a catalyst for future ones.
- Functional silos prevent the insight disseminating across the organisation
- Systems are not integrated, making it difficult to act and respond
Whatever reason, insight has relatively low value unless someone, somewhere, does something with it. As analytical technologies continue to develop and there is more and more insight available to those who want it and are organised to grasp it. But knowing for example, that you have a number of different customer segments is one thing, but how are you going to use that insight to best effect is another.
These are the things that interest us, how are companies are going to bridge the capability gap and truly gain return on their investment in analytical technologies, processes and people? It’s something that we’ll be talking about in posts to come.