Habits of Innovation

Despite BI’s advances, companies continue to struggle with responding quickly to a continuously evolving information landscape and the need for ease of information access that business users require. And big data technologies address sheer volume, but not the variety, velocity and complexity now referred to as extreme information.

Despite BI’s advances, companies continue to struggle with responding quickly to a continuously evolving information landscape and the need for ease of information access that business users require. And big data technologies address sheer volume, but not the variety, velocity and complexity now referred to as extreme information.

The recently released, Attivio AIE 3.0, gets to the heart of these problems by supporting the right information access method for each user in the enterprise and integrating all data sources, regardless of type.

What this means is that AIE 3.0 delivers insight and access into the business activity that is most important to each user’s particular function and corporate directive. AIE gives users who don’t understand dashboard construction or data relationships the ability to interact with information using the simple and powerful interface of search or role-based dashboards.

For more technical users who want to look at data in a very analytical way and are comfortable working with data visualization, AIE 3.0 now offers the most accessible and standards-based approach to analytics of any UIA platform. Through its JDBC and newly announced ODBC drivers and full SQL support, AIE seamlessly integrates with virtually any BI tool. Customers can now leverage the powerful capabilities of tools like Tableau, MicroStrategy, QlikView, Jaspersoft, Cognos, Business Objects and many more — bringing the rich context of unstructured content for users of the most cutting edge BI, visualization and analysis tools.

Developers working with AIE will appreciate new features that enable faster source integration, faster application development, reduced development cycles with dynamic configuration, a toolkit to quickly build Active Dashboards and deeper insight into document content.

Administrators will find enhancements for simpler multi-node configuration management, greater JOIN flexibility for streamlined index configuration due to increased JOIN flexibility and dynamic change configuration to minimize developer intervention requirements.

Clayton Christensen, who revolutionized the study of innovation with his groundbreaking The Innovator’s Dilemma, recently published The Innovator’s DNA. The book identifies five specific habits that characterize highly successful innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. These traits share a common thread of inquisitiveness. Innovators excel at discovering connections between seemingly unconnected things.

Professor Christensen notes that the most successful innovative companies actively value and encourage these same five habits in their employees. Unified access to all enterprise information sources, spanning all types of information — from structured data (databases, data warehouses, etc.) to unstructured content (documents, SharePoint, web content, email, etc.) cultivates and enables these critical habits.

Thankfully, this is not some desired future state of technology; this is unified information access from Attivio, available and actively used with success by Fortune 10 global leaders and bold startups alike.

In my upcoming posts, I will cover more key features and dig deeper into the insight AIE 3.0 offers.