Growing people in knowledge

Predictive analytics are pushing companies to invest money in new information systems and new skills, able to understand how to manage a big amount of data, sometimes unstructured. But data by itself can tell just part of the story. To understand it completely, knowledge is as important as data. Explicit and implicit knowledge is the lens to translate data into useful insight to gain competitive advantage.

It sounds simple! You know it is not exactly in this way.

Initiate, Plan, Execute & Control, Close. Five steps to comply with, to mitigate risks of an unsuccessful project. Dilbert is a Subject Matter Expert on this topic.

Your enterprise — business, government agency, NGO, even your family or household — has as its ultimate purpose or mission producing value — benefits, outcomes, and results in some specific form, for example:

• Profits and shareholder returns – if you are a business
• Patient health and outcomes – if you are a medical provider
• A better world, in some specific way – if you are a social enterprise or NGO
• Satisfied customers and clients – in all cases
• Productive and fulfilled employees – in all cases

In order to achieve that purpose, and all the goals that support it, your organization takes actions that are based on group decisions. The best decisions — those that produce optimal outcomes — are typically those that are based on the best knowledge (i.e., the most timely, most accurate, most relevant, etc.)

When the term “big data” first came on the scene, bestselling author Tom Davenport (Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work) thought it was just another example of technology hype. But his research in the years that followed changed his mind.

A Knowledge Jam is 5 step process. It's centerpiece is the 90-minute "discover/capture" event with a planned agenda, geared to facilitating, asking questions and exploring ideas associated with thorny business problems. The discussions of the Jam are documented live as much as possible, and the participants develop new respect and new connections that are expected to become new business relationships as the Jam ideas are acted upon during the broker and reuse steps.

Most companies have a massive amount of data at their disposal - yet fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But a powerful new business tool - analytics. is enabling many firms to aggressively leverage their data in key business decision and processes, with impressive results.

Davenport and Harris show how exemplary organizations as diverse as Boston Red Sox, Netflix, Amazon.com, CEMEX, Capital One, Harrah's Entertainment, Procter & Gamble, and Best Buy, are using new tools to trump rivals. Through analytics, these companies identify their most profitable customers, accelerate product innovation, optimize supply chains and pricing, and leverage the true drivers of financial performance.

In Collaboration, author Morten Hansen takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today's competitive environment, company wide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need?

In The Social Organization, two of Gartner's lead analysts strongly advocate exploiting social technology. The authors share insights from their study of successes and failures at more than four hundred organizations that have used social technologies to foster—and capitalize on—customers’ and employees’ collective efforts.

Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. In this provocative and inspiring book, you'll explore design patterns that apply across the categories of web, ecommerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real-time search and discovery. Filled with colorful illustrations and examples, Search Patterns brings modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance, faceted navigation, multi-touch, personalization, visualization, multi-sensory search, and augmented reality.

How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity. Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability.

Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet.