Billy Cripe and Nick Tuson published an article today looking at ways to use BI and ECM together. The article is titled, “Envisioning Business Intelligence as More Than Reporting Dashboards and Enterprise Content Management as More Than a Bucket of Stuff”. It’s a great title and a really exciting concept.
What they’re envisioning is using BI application to analyze ECM use, both in realtime as well as in aggregate and then use that information to make predictive content suggestions, perhaps in search and/or delivery.
At its core, the strategic vision of EIM systems is to move from the highly accurate but reflective descriptive analyses of present day BI systems to highly accurate, persuasive and forward-looking predictive systems…
Real-time decisioning (RTD) is a BI technology that tracks user behavior and determines what information is most likely to benefit, persuade or be useful
Out at OpenWorld last November we heard quite a few rumors that the former Stellent folks were busy tinkering away with Oracle’s Real Time Decisioning application. It was probably the most exciting tidbit of the trip as I know quite a few potential and current UCM customers who would love to see this technology become a realization.
In the article they lay out a test scenario for how a unified BI/ECM integration might work.
A user searches Google for “snibbling griblious” and selects the top result, which links the user to your organization’s web page. The page is not a simple, static HTML brochure; it is built by the web content management-enabled portions of your corporate ECM system, which is part of your larger EIM strategic infrastructure and therefore BI enabled. As the ECM system starts building the page, it sends the referring URL, search string and cookie ID to the RTD service of your EIM infrastructure. Then the ECM system indicates to the RTD service the user’s page visits. When constructing a page that includes implicit personalization, marketing or a test, the ECM system asks the RTD service to select specific content.
The ECM system asks the RTD service to select an appropriate, persuasive banner advertisement for this user. In order to determine what content is eligible for each decision, the RTD service consults the ECM system directly. As the ECM system is building the landing page for the user, the RTD service retrieves from its memory cache all the possible IDs for the banner ad in the home page. These results were previously cached by the RTD service, so performance is zippy. Based on previous BI analysis, the RTD service computes the likelihood of click through for each banner ad and selects the most appropriate one. The user views the landing page, is intrigued by the banner ad and clicks it. As soon as the user clicks, that information is returned to the RTD service, which stores the information in its own schema to use in further RTD analyses
Ok so there’s a lot going on there, but what they are laying out there is the behavior of a system that makes predictions based on historic data, real-time behavior and testing. In the past few months we’ve seen a tremendous amount of client interest in this exact requirement. ECM customers want the ability to target content to specific types of users, but not just with simple if/then logic that tends to silo content. They want the system to be adaptive and most importantly for it to be able to test all content across a samplings of all users.
I realize this is just a theoretical article with no products mentioned, but lets not kid ourselves either; This is no flying car, Oracle has these technologies right now and I would be shocked if they weren’t working on delivering integrations between RTD and UCM now.
thanks for the kind words. One correction, my co-author was Nick Tuson.
The theory in the article is based on real proofs too. This is really exciting technology coming together in cool ways. Its the tip of the iceberg.