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The Web has dramatically expanded the range and volume of information that can be used to inform business decisions. Information about contracts won, new products launched, successful technology trials, and so forth are all being made available online everyday. However, the sheer volume of information prevents any individual person (or even reasonable-sized group of people) from deriving useful, systematic insight in practice. The task of scanning this information, detecting what might be relevant, and transforming what has been detected into useful business insights is not feasible to do manually at scale.
In this talk, I will present a R&D effort at Accenture to develop a technology platform that can be customized to create a wide range of corporate radar applications which can systematically turn the vast amount of information on the Web into business insights. I will give an overview of this platform: describing the main components and technologies used. I will then illustrate the kinds of corporate radars that can be built with this platform through two applications we developed at Accenture: the Technology Lifecycle Tracker, which assesses the maturity of technologies from the wireless industry, and the Technology Trend Tracker, which measures hype versus reality for emerging technology trends such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and more. Finally, I will discuss our experiences in using this platform to build these applications and the lessons learned.
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