Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: The Land Beyond Transactions

Stewart McKie writes in Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: The Land Beyond Transactions about two kinds of cutting edge analytics, both have been covered on my blog a bit. He notes that with the exploding volume of data of RFID, "Location Analytics" will play a factor, as many metrics for measuring supply chain performance will be available. Being able to visualize metrics by location would no doubt lead to insight, a lesson which can be applied to almost any collection of data with location information.

He also writes about "Metadata Analytics", where previously unstructred data is now available with XML schemas. I agree this is a totally untapped source of info right now. The two examples he gives are XBRL (which I've written about before) and RSS/weblogs. This is actually something I've been thinking about too lately (deja vu), as some services like Feedster let you quickly dig through thousands of logs for mentions of, say, companies of industries. The specific application of it I was considering was a way to integrate such feeds into an SFA or CRM application, so, for example, a sales rep could pull up the summary info for their customer, and also see the latest blog news mentions and rumors about that customer (which I assume to be a company). Stewart mentions a few other cool possibilities... including innovation tracking and "reputational management." Lots of untapped potential there, that's for sure.