Iconification

I have been involved in a program named Hubspot. It is a little big (well over a 1300 variables) so there will always be data gaps. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, data gaps happen everywhere, it is how we manage them that matters. But it is not about the data gaps. As I was working yesterday, I saw another missing part. You see, there is an overwhelming need for a better level of intelligence, especially in marketing applications. This has been a fact for years and for the most people think of it as cloak and dagger stuff, but they would be wrong. Intelligence in commerce is essential, they refer to it as Business Intelligence. But over the last 10 years the term no longer applies the way it once did. The umbrella is too large and as such it no longer fits the purpose. Like Military Intelligence it now has a few umbrella’s. They are 

GEOINT
Geographical Intelligence is a much larger field in commerce. For example, there is IBM who has the information of millions of global corporations. They can see where Unilever has activities in Europe, Asia and Africa. As such they can push new more made to measure solutions for a player like Unilever making them a nice fortune in the process. And none of this is ‘under the table’ it is up and out in front. A setting of where they all can go and where they all can unite profit margins. A player like Unilever might be the most visible one but they are not alone. Tech players, governments the EU as a whole, they get a much better serve because of the applied solutions that GEOINT has in commerce.

DIGINT

Digital Intelligence is pretty new, in military sides it is often part of open intelligence channels. In commerce it is still growing, they use the channels different, they seperate all sources (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) these are the largest three but they are not alone. It is also the part that has the most issues. Fake identities, fake processes and fake information make DIGINT an essential part, but a more artistic hand is required. The golden rule of ‘Trust but verify’ is at the heart of this. The problem is two fold, not all intelligence is intentional, sometimes it is a simple miscommunication that starts it. But finding the golden strings tend to lead to options and that is why they are more and more essential. They could point to the person no other way would have revealed, if only one source had the proper name, the proper place and the proper event it worked out well, but that is the problem we do not always get all the puzzle pieces and we think we are creating an image. Yet what happens when the puzzle is kinetic? What happens when the puzzle is not an image but a 20 second movie looping non-stop until the puzzle is complete? It takes a different skill and that skill will be required by governments and by commerce on a global scale, especially when all commerce is trying to complete as much revenue as possible.

OSINT

Open Source Intelligence is a collection of all matters, it is the least trusted, but it is the collection of mails, letters and all kinds of information, here the source is the important part and vetting the source matters to all concerned. It could be an internal person who thinks fondly of IBM, has friends at IBM, and that matters. 

All these elements come together in marketing and now I notice that a place like Hubspot (et al) will need some kind of dashboard, not one dashboard, but numerous dashboards that can collect and display snippets of notes, call notes, response notes that can be used and combined to give new clarity on any client, no matter where they are. And the local intelligence analyst will need to make sense of it all, make sense of hundreds of warm calls, cold calls and other information to see where a larger gain can be made and in commerce that matters. I wonder if Palantir will connect to Hubspot, or if Hubspot will create its own intelligence dashboard system, but I feel decently certain that one of the two will happen, the way commerce is moving makes it close to impossible to ignore that part of commerce revenue.