Information overload is a challenge many in business face today. How do you ensure all relevant signals from your company’s market environment are picked up, whilst the efforts for doing so are minimised and the decision-makers only receive need-to-know information and analysis when they need it?
Erik Elgersma simplifies it…
Timely, complete and accurate monitoring
Accurately forecasting future market developments enables businesses to grab opportunities first and to mitigate risks in a timely manner. Good business forecasting requires a permanent and intensive monitoring of the global market environment. Monitoring should include both qualitative data and quantitative data.
Today’s technology enables highly automated internet-news and social media monitoring search protocols. Your company can thus screen thousands of sources on a permanent basis for news on markets, customers and competitors in multiple languages. For large companies, such search protocols may easily offer 500 “raw” news items daily.
Efficient processing and decision-maker-focused distribution
This “raw” news must be filtered by relevance. This typically enables a rejection of up to 90% of the raw catch. Automatically each of the selected items can subsequently get multi-dimensional thesaurus-based key-word tags. The thesaurus of these key word metadata should be based on each company’s corporate strategic value drivers, so it matches the language of any and all business’ managers. Adding key word tags enables choosing and disseminating the news that matters most to each individual manager.
By using the value drivers as starting point, all senior managers can now get a daily email based on their personal, tailored, need-to-know news feed. Through this granular distribution, managers are able to stay on top of their own need-to-know developments. Implementing such a news collection, filing and distribution system enables companies to turn what is information overload to others into a competitive advantage for them.
When puzzled on how to turn information overload into a competitive advantage, read The Strategic Analysis Cycle – Handbook by Erik Elgersma. As a practitioner, he has designed and implemented the system described here in a 22,000 staff, $14bn sales global company.
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