"Put a lens on it for me."
I sat across from him at the table, his team and mine along the periphery, waiting for him to expound on the statement.
He kept flipping back and forth in the proposal pages as if magical insight would jump forth and say, here I am -- buy me!
"Yes, that's what I need to see -- put a lens on this for me so I understand what to expect."
That was only a few weeks ago and has stuck with me ever sense. That's what any of us need in business, right? Give me a lens on "information" I'm interested in so I can make fact-based correlations, recommendations, decisions and predictions.
The ol' what's in it for me schtick. Really this time, in real-time. Because Googling, managing spreadsheets and guessing is so 2007.
Managing data is mind-bending. Even though the human brain can store vast amounts of information, our working memory can only recall up to 7 things at one time.
Easy peasy. But recalling vast amounts of data to make fact-based decisions?
Not gonna happen humanly (yet). Imagine the sheer volume along and you'll pass out. A petabyte of information is equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes. My goodness that's a lot of information. Our minds have a hard enough fathoming a gig much less a handful of megabytes.
Or up to 7 items at once.
But today we can put a lenses on the vast amounts of data we deal with in business and again make fact-based correlations, recommendations, decisions and predictions. We have the storage space and the magic algorithms that make it all happen.
For example, Dovetail Software offers an HR case management system designed to carefully track, audit, automate and deliver analytics on employee complaints and grievances. The software puts a lens on the organization and helps to mitigate legal risks while giving employers insights into hidden and potentially dangerous employee relations trends and patterns.
Another example is Visier Workforce Analytics, a software system that integrates business and workforce data from all sources in an organization. It comes pre-built with "best practices" so companies can focus on making better decision immediately to impact their most important asset: their people. Today most high-performance companies use workforce analytics to measure and manage a wide range of things including recruiting, turnover and employee performance.
And you're not going to get away without again hearing about SocialEars again, our social listening software product. SocialEars is all about listening to the social conversations, discovering trending topics and the media outlets and people participating in and influencing those discussions, being able to read their shared and authored “content” and most importantly – joining in conversations and engaging the right people.
Today, social analytics software makes it possible to monitor, analyze and comprehend an increasingly complex marketplace and vast amounts of information while delivering more effective marketing and media relations insight -- in only hours, not months.
"Put a lens on the world for me, would you?"
Absolutely. We can do that now.
(In full disclosure, we're working with the two companies referenced above, which is a lens of another kind, don't you think?)
Labels: big data, HR case management, socal analytics, social listening, SocialEars, workforce analytics