Understanding the Building Blocks of Insight

Our latest eBook, “2012 Guide to an Insightfull Customer-Centric Organization,” helps organizations understand how to leverage the Insight inside their enterprise and social data and move towards a more customer-centric model of business. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share additional thoughts on each of the 10 steps that we advise companies follow to create stronger, more productive and customer-focused organizations.

Recently, I wrote about the shift from being a product-centric organization to a customer-centric organization. As you look to make that journey, the first step is to understand what knowledge capital is, where it resides, and how it can be turned into Insight in order to move towards a customer-centric environment.

Wikipedia defines knowledge capital as “the concept which asserts that ideas have intrinsic value which can be shared and leveraged within and between organizations.” However, ask 10 different people within your company to define it and you will get 10 different answers. Wikipedia defines knowledge as the human capacity to take effective action in varied or uncertain circumstances. To many companies, it simply means data, which is a gross over simplification of the term. While data is a variable in the formula that equates to knowledge, on its own, it is just a building block. Data is just data until it is combined to become information. It is the interaction with humans that turns information into knowledge.

And today, data is everywhere – it is no longer in only structured systems. It is unstructured and resides in voicemails and emails and even social media. Imagine how much Insight could be gleaned from truly understanding what your customers are saying about you on Twitter, inin discussion forums, and in all channels into your company—consolidated and correlated with information about their products and history? And then imagine how that could impact everything from how you market and sell your product, how you develop your product(s), how your service customers, and more.

To understand how turning data into knowledge and then into Insight can impact everything from customer service to engineering and development to sales and marketing, check out the first step – “Understanding the Building Blocks of Insight” – in our eBook.

How do you define knowledge capital and what do you consider to be the important building blocks within your organization to developing Insight?