Every leader wants his business to generate competitive insights better than his competition. But how do you find the process insight that will enable you to build insight-generation capability into your organization? Like many processes within your business, insights are GIGO-oriented: garbage-in, garbage-out. The insights generated by your organization (the “output”) are highly dependent on the information being analyzed (the “inputs”). Insights are gleaned from a variety of sources. Often, they seem intuitive – leaping fully formed into an individual’s mind.

Whether intuited or consciously sought, insights are produced on the basis of a wide variety of inputs, varying from data retrieval and analysis, educational experiences or interactions and experience in the workplace and beyond. The insights an individual generates are the sum product of their knowledge and experiences. Often, the subconscious will amalgamate this “total knowledge” to produce highly precise insights – and the individual may not even be conscious that it has happened.

An executive seeking to boost his or her team’s insight productivity should understand which inputs are involved in the process and come to terms with the fact that some factors he or she cannot influence. With a limited array of inputs subject to the employer’s direct control, your focus should be on maximizing the ability of those inputs you can influence. Often this means actively minimizing insight inhibitors.

Insight Inhibitors

Insight inhibitors are the structural factors within your organization that significantly decrease your insight productivity. In general, there are two kinds of insight inhibitor:

• Accessibility Barriers limit employee’s practical ability to extract information from available inputs. These barriers include information silos, rigid mindsets and tools, and training only a few “super-users” to use the data analysis tools.
• Process Inhibitors are structural factors within your organization, relating to business process design or team dynamics, which inhibit an employee’s ability to communicate or implement his insight.

While Accessibility Barriers tend to be manageable through the judicious application of technology, Process Inhibitors can only be addressed through your business culture and processes. Your organization may have a culture where “thinking out-of-the-box” is not encouraged. Your compensation structures may be designed to discourage risk-taking. Your “idea workflow” may be too bureaucratic and slow. Or perhaps your employees do not have an “insight pathway” to follow.

If your employees have problems applying their insights, they will be discouraged from coming forward with ideas. They will still generate insight: people are naturally creative and will always discover insights on their own. However, such process inhibitors will do something more dangerous: they will inhibit the application of insights.

Leveling Accessibility Barriers

Accessibility Barriers can be removed through the application of technology. Significant improvements in this regard have been made over the last ten years with the advent of corporate intranets, enterprise search and business intelligence platforms. While these technologies significantly increase insight productivity by lowering Accessibility Barriers, they are unable to actually level them.

The corporate intranet has become the information hub of the modern enterprise. Your corporate intranet provides you with a natural distribution platform for providing employees throughout your organization with the information they need on-demand. It is through your corporate intranet that employees can access the tools that provide them with information: business intelligence platforms and enterprise search systems.

BI platforms – one of the driving promoters of insight productivity in the enterprise – are a valuable tool to provide employees with the numerical data on enterprise performance. The primary benefit of integrated BI platforms is that they erode or eliminate the existence of information silos within your organization. They also provide necessary support to your business processes and a “baseline” view of your organization. But while BI platforms successfully address the problem of information silos within your organization, they fail to resolve problems of rigidity or super-user training requirements.

Enterprise search makes it possible for employees throughout your company to find information they need on-demand, without having to go to super-users to get it. It is simple and intuitive: no training required. If an employee can use the Google search engine, then they can use enterprise search.

Enterprise search systems are designed to search out prepared information in e-mails, documents, presentations, web pages or even business intelligence reports. However the basic underlying assumption is that some individual or group within the organization has already prepared the content. The role of the enterprise search platform is to make this content accessible to users. However, they do not alleviate the problems of rigidity or the problems of information silos. Often, enterprise search engines are unable to see much of the information available within the enterprise and may have difficulty providing relevant information in response to user queries.

The bottom-line from an employee’s perspective is that while the corporate intranet provides a centralized repository of information that is readily accessible, the available tools for finding and accessing this information fail to remove existing accessibility barriers. However, executives seeking to remove accessibility barriers within their enterprise can utilize a new set of tools to accomplish this goal: numerical data search engines.

Numerical data search engines integrate the ease-of-use of enterprise search with the data manipulation capabilities of business intelligence platforms. The result is a search engine that can automatically access any data within your organization, find on-demand information relevant to any user within your organization, and return that data to the user in an accessible and easy-to-use format. By seamlessly integrating with your existing technologies (including enterprise search and business intelligence), numerical data search engines systems effectively addresses all three of the most-common accessibility barriers.

Through judicious use of each of these three technologies (BI platforms, enterprise search systems, and numerical data search engines), your organization can remove all accessibility barriers and maximize the likelihood that your employees will generate productive and valuable insights at all levels and in all roles within your enterprise.

About R.L. Fielding

R.L. Fielding is a freelance writer who has written on a wide variety of topics, with special expertise in the education, pharmaceutical and healthcare, financial service and manufacturing industries.

About ChartSearch

This article was provided by ChartSearch.  ChartSearch is a newly launched enterprise technology company which helps businesses maximize insight productivity through the use of a first-of-its-kind numerical data search engine and real-time business intelligence platform. With ChartSearch, businesses can find and extract research data on-demand, then automatically visualize it in a readily accessible form. For more information, please visit www.chartsearch.net.