The Question of The Intelligent Brand #6

Network Intelligence

A simple definition

Intelligence has many definitions, perhaps too many. For our current purposes, we’re concerned with what we can call the ‘functional intelligence’ that gets results.

While a person we might refer to as intelligent could be a scatty academic, a ruthless fraudster, or a precocious child, the aspect of intelligence that arguably matters most - not just in business but in today’s world - is quite simply an ability to make sense of things to generate intentional outcomes that are beneficial. (In this sense, intelligence and power are not far from each other.)

When we speak of actionable information, we’re referring to an increase in our available intelligence: in fact, the actionability more or less entirely determines the value of information.?

We’re thinking of intelligence, therefore, in terms of the ability to find, articulate, and also to act upon, meaning.

When thus equipped, we are able - as a single person or a large corporation - to assess, to decide and to do what’s best. To further our own interests, and in some instances, those of others.

A road to clarity

Tracing the history of intelligence in business, its journey from the happy simplicity of the quest for a better mousetrap, through to the unimaginable complexity and velocity of today’s Web, offers an urgently needed sense-making lens through which we can, perhaps for the first time, fully grasp the nature and scale of the enormous shift we are experiencing.?

We’ve been hung up on the data, and looked to the data scientists to make sense of it for us. Understandable, but impractical. Our current hopes and expectations of Artificial Intelligence are underpinned - for now at least - by the same magical thinking.

We’ve turned to network theory and network scientists to help us understand the dynamics of the Web. They can tell us how and why networks grow, and how they’re made up of nodes and links. But they remain - as do we - in the foothills of articulating what makes the Web work.

The insight that matters - the one that gives leadership the picture on the box of the puzzle we’ve all been puzzling over - is how business intelligence itself has been transformed by the collision of billions of human lives and minds with a global network that now carries some 95% of all the world’s information. And in turn, how this impacts the daily experience and expectations of our customers.?

From there, the implications for how we structure business and its brands - to meet the newly empowered customer where they now live - begin to emerge. This informs the philosophy for our own transformation. We can also begin to frame what shapes and determines customer value from here on. Which helps us make more sure-footed, faster decisions about innovation.

A power shift

As we’d expect, business intelligence, in four of the six phases outlined in the previous newsletter, has been applied exclusively to optimise outcomes for the corporation. And this happens - naturally, if not ideally - at the expense of what may be best for customers. But the rise of networked intelligence has already significantly tipped the balance the other way.?

Customers are now - in ways we may already fail to appreciate due to their ubiquity - well-equipped to work out and find what’s best for them. The new network intelligence that so informs and empowers has introduced reach, range and transparency that now directly affect all corporate concerns - from pricing right up to purpose.

The turning point we have reached is one where business can no longer just apply intelligence to get what it wants at the expense of what others - “people and planet” - want.

This line of thought points us, usefully, towards what will, as we’ll see next, prove to be the most desirable and mutually beneficial value-creating market behaviour of The Network Age - active collaboration and co-creation. Surely the most valuable of all commercial intelligence enables a brand to optimally serve a customer at the time and place - in the context - of current need.

Now that we are beginning to understand what we had failed to previously grasp, we are infinitely better equipped to step across the aisle and look at modern value through the sceptical eye of the modern customer.

How can the firm and the customer best apply network intelligence to balance and achieve what’s best for them both? As we’ll see, there are already widespread behaviours that clearly point the way forward.