Insight on Insight — Part 1

I love my job.

I really do.

I’m not just say­ing this in case my bosses read this.

Maybe not the part about get­ting up early.  Or hav­ing to travel some­times when I would rather not.

But I do like the fact that I have spent the last 4+ years of my career work­ing closely with a prod­uct that con­tin­ues to amaze me every day with its vast capa­bil­i­ties and end­less possibilities.

Some of you used to know it as Visual Work­sta­tion.  It then got named Dis­cover onPremise when Visual Sci­ences was acquired by Omni­ture.  It had a lit­tle iden­tify cri­sis for a while as it tried to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself from the sim­i­larly named Discover.

But now, it finally has a name.

And the name, my friends, makes a whole lot of sense.

Insight.

For those of you who don’t know what Insight is, it is an extremely flex­i­ble sys­tem that allows for large vol­umes of data to be ana­lyzed in real-time, with­out the restric­tions of tra­di­tional cube based data­bases.  The schema is fairly open, and while some amount of dis­ci­pline and atten­tion to detail is nec­es­sary when build­ing a dataset in Insight, the sys­tem is vastly flex­i­ble in the kinds of rela­tion­ships and deep analy­sis you can do.

Because with Insight, the sky is the limit.

How­ever, with great power comes great responsibility.

And a need to really know your stuff.

I have seen com­pa­nies who have used Insight to develop game-changing strate­gies for them­selves, and have enjoyed ENORMOUS ROI based off of the dis­over­ies they have made about their customers.

And I say cus­tomers and NOT vis­i­tors for a rea­son.  I will get back to that later.

I have also seen cus­tomers who have not been as suc­cess­ful, so I will not sugar coat things here.  How­ever, there are vast dif­fer­ences in the ways that they have approached their imple­men­ta­tions and ongo­ing man­age­ment of their sys­tem and their busi­ness strategy.

I am going to be tak­ing a deeper look into Insight over the next few weeks.  The fol­low­ing areas I’d like to cover in regards to Insight are the following:

1) Where makes Insight a true dif­fer­en­tia­tor in the market?

2) Is Insight too com­plex for me?

3) When it makes sense to con­sider Insight for your business

4) What kind of analy­sis mod­els are com­pa­nies using today to push Insight in new direc­tions — as well as com­pany busi­ness strategies

5) How to develop a gov­er­nance model for suc­cess with an Insight investment

6) Does Insight replace the need for your data ware­house? (Hint — the answer is no, but I will tell you why in a dif­fer­ent post)

I am going to be hon­est here.  Insight is NOT for every­body.  Maybe I shouldn’t say that — I am the ven­dor.  But I will not lie either.  It takes resources, it takes dil­li­gence and it doesn’t spit out answers on your com­pany strat­egy — it enables you to make the deci­sions that matter.

It’s not a genie in a bottle.

But it’s pretty darn close — if you know what you are doing with it.

I stand my sup­po­si­tion that if you want to do end to end customer-centric analy­sis, span­ning across mul­ti­ple chan­nels (web, call, store, loy­alty card activ­i­ties) — you are falling short if you are not tak­ing advan­tage of this technology.

I will tell you why over the next two weeks.

Here’s to some Insight on Insight.

Cheers!