Briefs

A growing crop of companies addresses the challenge of finding trends and tendencies within a mind-boggling expanse of collected data.

Mar 08, 2005 -- By Megan Santosus -- CIO.com

For Sam Valanju, vice president and CIO at Johnson Controls, knowledge management begins with a single word: patterns.

Johnson Controls collects all sorts of information about all sorts of automotive systems and building control systems products that the company makes. Through interactions with call center personnel via Web-based chat rooms and e-mail, and through field reports, Johnson Controls has many ways to garner knowledge about its customers, the products they use and the experiences they have with those products. The problem, as Valanju readily acknowledges, is making sense of that data.

For Valanju, software from a company called Intelligenxia is helping instill some order into the chaotic nature of unstructured data. More interesting than the technology itself is the way that Johnson Controls is using it. The software, says Valanju, “is used as a corporate resource; it’s essentially a centralized service for the divisions.” For example, a rep in a call center may field an inquiry about an equipment installation. In an effort to troubleshoot the issue, the rep will need to know whether there is any corresponding knowledge in the field that relates to that specific equipment. By typing in a query—similar, says Valanju, to doing a search on Google or Verity—the rep can search through unstructured data such as e-mail and field report documents to see if there are any prevailing trends related to the equipment, the customer or even geographic concerns that may have affected installation.

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