How to discover critical business intelligence on time

By FirstWatch

Data is not the oil of this era… if it were, we’d have drowned in oil.

Too often, data and critical business intelligence are referred to as the ‘lifeblood’, or oil of the modern age. Yeah, yeah – we get it… BUT… there is one unbelievably crucial difference. We don’t need to drill miles down into the surface of the planet to find information… In fact, we can’t escape it. 

There is so much information available.

And, it is growing exponentially.

The challenge we face is not sourcing the oil… it’s refining that crude substance into something that is valuable. It’s surfacing the critical business intelligence that matters. It’s discovering wisdom in data. It’s turning information overload into actionable intelligence. 

So, how do you go about that? 

Firstly, it’s about organizing the information that matters into a structure that makes sense for you. You need to ensure the information sources that you need are all centralized into a single location, and then ordered to suit you or your team’s needs.

But let’s not get too far in the weeds… if you want to know more about organizing your information – this is the blog for you!

Once the information is organized to meet your needs, the next challenge is surfacing the critical insights from the information that matters.

It’s about leveraging the latest in technology which is, predominantly (you guessed it), AI or Artificial Intelligence – to identify and bring to the forefront, the critical intelligence that matters to you and your business. 

But the thing with AI is – it isn’t an instant solution. First, it needs to build a profile of what you’re interested in by getting to know your information preferences. (Look, we’ll be real… the process is much more complex than that behind the scenes, but for all intents and purposes, that’s the only bit you need to worry about).

Once it’s learned enough about your interests and preferences, it can start to sort the information that you have organized into the relevant insights that you actually are chasing!

But it’s not all AI.

AI is great. It’s the future. We all know it. But it still has some limitations.

Think of the information-sphere (all of the information available, ever) as a funnel. Good AI (as in, “well trained”… not as in, “not evil”) can filter out about 90% of the information noise, leaving you with the 10% that’s going to make a difference to you.

GREAT! But, that’s still a significant amount of noise to have to filter through yourself to get to those nuggets of information that are really going to make the difference in your decision-making.

That’s when good human expertise comes into play. By utilizing the best of AI and human expertise you can rely on the AI technology to handle the bulk of the ‘noise’, and then human experts can further refine that information for you to cut it down even further.

Using AI alone to surface
insights		Combining AI and human
expertise

Now… this 5% difference might not seem significant, but how regularly are you utilizing information to inform your decision-making? (Spoiler: the answer should be most of the time!). If you can halve (if not more) the information gathering and evaluating process, you’re not only speeding up your decision-making process. You are also giving yourself the confidence that you are making the most informed and accurate decision possible. 

This is very similar to how FirstWatch handles its information discovery and filtering.

FirstWatch combines the AI-driven technologies (that handle the mass) with human expertise (either our in-house curators or your organization’s own experts) to further refine the information that the technology has highlighted as being of most importance. 

While the comparison of data and oil is slightly misleading, in essence, it’s still correct. Information matters more today than it ever has, but the right information matters more. With the amount of noise out there, it’s now more critical than ever for organizations to be able to refine the information noise into critical business intelligence – something that they can actually derive decisions from.

Let us help you turn information noise into actionable intelligence today.