Tools for CI Professionals

[Dorai Thodla]

We have a few services built for tracking web, aggregating/filtering RSS feed and custom tools extracting information from text. Will these be of any use to CI Professionals? What do you currently use?

Dorai

[Chris Hote]

Hi Dorai, This is a good start. Additional useful features would be tools:
- to analyze/categorize this information
- to collaborate on those digital assets
- to distribute it to upper management and other intelligence beneficiaries
- to measure the actual performance of the overall system
Chris.

[Dorai Thodla]

Chris,
Thanks. Really appreciate your taking the time to provide valuable input.

We do have some of the things you mentioned but not all.

1. Categorize the information based on a topic hierarchy
2. To collaborate (share the information and comment on it) - since all the information is put into an open source portal framework

Distributing and measuring performance are two really useful inputs. I guess distribution will require some manual effort to summarize and fit into a custom information model.

We have some hooks into the system to measure the performance. We need to build some performance metrics after talking to some CI professionals.

[Roberto Sanchez]

Hi Dorai, would you mind sharing with me the name of the software's you are using to track the web, aggregating/filtering the RSS and tools to extract the information from texts? What happen is that I am planning to start a company servicing the small and medium enterprises sector, so I would appreciate if you can share some insights about that. Thanks in advance!

[Dorai Thodla]

Roberto,
The page monitoring software is called InfoMinder - http://infominder.com/

It has a free trial for 30 days.

The RSS aggregation/filtering and syndicating product is called InfoEngine. It is currently in beta with a few limited domains. I will be happy to demo it to you. You can contact me on Skype/gtalk. My id in both is - dorait

Thank you for your interest.

Dorai

[Dorai Thodla]

Next week will work. I am open on Tuesday/Wed etc. Let us connect on gtalk/skype. My id is dorait in both.

You can also call me at 408-876-8802

Dorai

[Vishwanath Machiraju]

I hail from professional services marketing space where B2B channel gives very little scope for public domain transliteration. We rely heavily on sales managers inputs. RSS helps in case our competitors are listed companies and have placed information on a strategic note.
Other than that, I am looking at Excel and Sharepoint as of now along with Web RSS to collate and analyze.

@Forum: Your thoughts on how to extract CI information for an Engineering Services firm and explore other avenues for CI. I want to reduce dependency of manual collection of CI inputs from the Sales front and automate the collation and analytics.

[Chris Hote]

Many software solutions exist to partly automate some aspects of the intelligence workflows, more specifically, collation and analytics. What impede you using them?

[Vishwanath Machiraju]

@Chris: Thanks for your note..I am a CI enthusiast however, unaware of the tools avbl for automation.(will be helpful if you could suggest a few)
Currently, we are using a share point portal to feed in messages from sales managers. Also, we are planning to implement a CRM tool to capture information on competition at the revenue generation end. Information gathering from the various touch points will have to be driven like a business rule for consistent inflow of information.
The bottleneck, frankly, to this entire CI process is the hurdle of getting the buy-in from necessary stakeholders to accept this as a culture, a process. Educating the benefits of CI is work in progress. But getting the buy-in from old school of thought touch points is a challenge I am currently working on. The enterprise is believing in reactive marketing since it worked for it so long, I should say, by accident. But not necessarily going forward.

[Dorai Thodla]

Viswanath,
Thanks for sharing that. We do use web pages and RSS feeds for extracting information and entities. When we have some thing that you can try, will send you a message. We are planning to provide a free service for some basic research of companies and products.

Dorai

[Vishwanath Machiraju]

Sure. Great. I rely heavily on RSS feeds and public domain research for necessary inputs. Would be wonderful if you could share the free service to get a glimpse of your expertise. I can be reached at
[e-mail]