One of the great features in Dovetail Software’s Email Manager
(and there are many) has always been its ability to query and update
the Clarify database via email. Often seen as a case-resolution
advantage, it now shows how well it dovetails into today’s growth of
business intelligence requirements.
Business intelligence
capability requires integrated data that can both be retrieved from
across the entire enterprise in customizable summary form, and drilled
down to with tightly specific granularity. And the tools had better be
easy to use, or the people who most need the intelligence – generally
the business side, not the tech side – won’t know how to use the system.
“As companies try to use performance management and
business intelligence technologies, the one thing they realize is that
they have to make these things brain-dead simple [...] ‘When you have
experts act as a go-between person between the data and the user, those
things just naturally back up,” Hagerty said. “Vendors are trying to
eliminate those backups and make the information available to anyone
who needs it.’” – Princeton Review educates itself in business performance management
A vast amount of unstructured customer
information lives in email archives across the enterprise. And most
compilations of data reside in spreadsheets, largely separate and
unintegrated. For much of business, these two applications are
Microsoft’s Outlook and Excel, respectively.
Dovetail’s choice of Microsoft’s .NET 2.0
development platform thus delivers enormous value to the Clarify
business community as the hunt for data heats up. And Dovetail’s open-standards design philosophy opens wide the path for extensive integration between desks and departments, as well as for querying from search technologies.
The
following article shows why this is necessary, as well as illustrating
both the cross-enterprise range and the granularity required.
“Let’s say you want to figure out why sales are
falling for a particular product. You could start with a customer
relationship management (CRM) database query, to determine who stopped
ordering that product, but you would also want to find out if those
customers had emailed or called with any complaints about the product.
That might also be in the CRM file, or it might be in notes taken by your call center reps who spoke with the unhappy customers.
“Maybe the product was delayed in shipping, or
different channels were pricing it differently, or some competitor’s
product is preferred. Where do you look to find this information?” – Search Converging with Business Intelligence
There are systemic and architectural aspects
to business intelligence, which we will cover in future. But the call
is for very nimble tools on the desktop, to deliver data displays
composed rapidly (and perhaps never reused) for immediate consumption.
