The corporate world is full of
studies on hard drives and desk drawers that have been paid for, yet not acted
on to drive business results.
The culprit, what I call “Zombie
Data” – is the information that isn’t quite alive – or is recently dead. A
snapshot of the recent past. Driving a car by looking in the
rear-view-mirror.
To combat investment in Zombie Data,
we need new methods to support keeping insights alive and vital – worthy of
action and attracting attention and resources.
In a case titled “IBM Global Mobile
Computing Segmentation: The Prometheus Project” written in 2006 by Dr. John
Lynch at Duke Fuqua School of Business where I am the protagonist (today John
is professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at
Boulder) the key to global success was getting the organization to act on the
results. We have been tag-team teaching this case for a decade and both agree
the research was superb – yet the action plan was even better. It was my first
taste of waging war with potential data zombies.
A product from machine learning
company SZL.IT called Tanjo is one new tool to counteract Zombie
Data ready for use in conjunction with traditional research such as market
segmentation. Tanjo means “birth” in Japanese. Tanjo can give birth to a
steady stream of daily information flows and news relevant to the profile of
each identified customer segment. It can draw insights from the world-at-large
using AI-bots and with enterprise permissions, and can also search for relevant
information for work-teams from internal intranet sources.
Another example of Tanjo in action is
with CommonWeal DealMaker investment capital social graphs. If you know
the people investing in startups in a region, sector or industry, Tanjo can
bring the network to life every day with information and news about economic
actors in that network. DealMaker is born of the doctoral dissertation work by
Dr. Ted Zoller at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kenan
Flagler Business School, Kenan Institute of Entrepreneurship.
A platform approach to doing the
research in the first place and keeping it fresh can be found with the advanced
choice research and visualization capabilities of Vennli. Developed as a
method at Notre Dame for decades by Dr. Joe Urbany, Vennli is now an integrated
research platform tool. It is the worthy successor to the standard “SWOT
Analysis” and has many more insights. Vennli can counteract the Zombie Data
effect by offering a way to repeat customer choice research on a regular basis
that is highly repeatable, comparable and affordable. Vennli can also perform
“insight-out” research that identifies gaps from the inside of the organization
with customer wants and needs – and what is being done in the present and what
will need to be done in the future.
ChoiceFlow™ is also in the process of
combatting Zombie Data. A systematic approach to developing better stimulus for
customer and market research, and animating results in a way that is both
actionable and being updated on a continuous basis, ChoiceFlow combats Zombie
Data by making it come alive to people who need to make choices for customers
and markets every day. Much of the insights for ChoiceFlow come from the life
work of Jordan Louviere in Choice Modeling Research - and Best-Worst Scaling –
and the research-in-action work of Kevin Clark as a market intelligence leader
(MIL) at IBM for the Personal Systems Group and corporate Experience Design
practice. Also contributing to ChoiceFlow is Robert Meyer at Wharton, Tiago
Ribeiro, Institute for Choice, and Richard Boyd leading Szl.it and Tanjo.
ChoiceFlow today is a practice of Content Evolution and is a standalone
business in formation.
Kevin Clark is Federation Leader and
President of Content Evolution, with member companies that connect customer and
market insights to nextgen business models, brands, and designed customer
experiences. CommonWeal and Vennli are members of the Content Evolution
federation. ChoiceFlow is a practice of Content Evolution. Szl.it, creator of
Tanjo, is a Content Evolution client.
