Extracting business ideas from the records of information technologies
Author: Aaron Ehasz
Many businesses are unaware of it, but your IT infrastructure is constantly and automatically collecting a complete image of your business in many forms, from web server logs and traffic through your internal network and up to the e-mail system.
These valuable data are often left as the responsibility of IT staff. However, some software companies are trying to find ways to extract information from them to guide the development of new ideas and strategies. Erik Swan, CTO of Splunk , a software company based in San Francisco, is on a mission to enable organizations to gather and consult all the digital data they generate. “We do not mind the format of the data,” says Swan. “Splunk can be fed anything and it indexes all like a big recording device.”
For example, if you type the name of a city in the search box like Google’s Splunk, you could make the program will show all the phone calls and all visitors to its web portal that place that the records contain . “Within minutes, I can do I can see a map showing where they come from our incoming phone calls, or where they come most of the missed calls,” said Swan. “Thanks to Splunk works in real time, even I can see on the map itself calls that are taking place right now.” This type of research can help a company to reorganize its call center to make it more efficient or to improve the service experienced by customers of a particular region, he explains.
Swan indicated that the Splunk customer base includes approximately half of the Fortune 100, plus the Department of Defense, which is used for intelligence analysis, among other things. Generally, the tool appears first in the hands of IT staff looking for a new way to explore the records of the infrastructure, but is spreading rapidly, says Swan. “We’ve seen some of the IT geeks become real heroes of business as a result, because they suddenly have access to new business ideas.”
Edmunds.com , which provides its customers with information about new and used cars, is one such example. Originally, the IT workers of the company began using Splunk to better understand the patterns of visits to the website, to determine, for example, if a sudden increase in traffic was caused by a cyber attack or was the result of a Article viral-and to help the control system of records. Today, Edmunds uses Splunk for more.
“Currently, data tables provide the business units of the company to have updated information that helps them make decisions,” said John Martin, chief operating officer Edmunds applications. “The information that the business units of the company need our records are in IT, but until recently did not study.”
A picture of such data allows the editorial and marketing team to be monitored in real time what brands and models of cars are attracting more visitors. This allows the company to experiment with ways to be more sensitive to what users are doing at all times. For example, ads may be arranged to coincide with what most people are interested in a particular time.
Splunk’s software need be installed only on a computer network of the organization and then have to tell it where to store the data, internal or external to the firm of interest. The extensive and diverse resulting index may capture more about the operations of a company than any other tool, says Swan. The exploration of this index may allow the rapid identification of new opportunities and missed opportunities and provide real time information about any attempt to exploit them.
Swan hopes the power of a tool like Splunk employers will take a real data-driven approach to any decision or strategy. “Soon we will have among us a generation that knows that at any time and data tools available to answer any question,” he says. “Those people will be able to move faster than they came before.”
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Posted in Business Ideas | 
Tags: business ideas, businesses, information technologies, your business