Author(s: Robert Fox Data Science We will see the changes in the landscape over the next two-years. What will be the next swing of the pendulum? My 25 years in commercial software engineering have seen me lead teams at leading companies like MuleSoft, now Salesforce. The industry has made incredible progress. As the Chief Technology Officer of HG Insights I have the opportunity to be at the forefront of data science. In this interview, I share some of my thoughts about data and insight. It is clear that having patents on innovative technologies will be a way for the intelligence industry to dominate the future. 1. Rob, in 2021, there is more data than you can use. 99.5% remains unutilized, which is 0.5% worth of actionable insight. What makes data actionable and how does it become insight? Most businesses don’t have the expertise or infrastructure to transform data into useful insights. It’s like this: Everybody needs fuel to drive their cars. But, we rarely make our own fuel. The fuel of the business is insights. Our unique work is defined by the volume of data that we gather and how much we discard. We clean, prepare, and dedupe billions of documents every month. Additionally, we gather even more digital data to find out what might have useful insights, before mining it. As important as mining and extracting is the reduction process. Our insights are also of exceptional quality. We collect billions of data points that can be used by customers each month. However, not all information is included. The quality of our empirical data points is very important to us. Our data must be 90% precise. It’s just an insight, but it doesn’t mean that it will generate ROI for customers. We cannot deliver customer value if the quality of our insights is poor. We place more importance on quality than quantity when it comes to insights. Data is transformed into insight by gathering a large amount of information, reducing it to a manageable size and transforming it so that it can be easily consumed by customers through our services and products. We provide insights that drive customer value, and maximize their ROI. Our services help our customers to sort through all the data and find the relevant signals. 2. How do you innovate HG Insights’ products to meet the changing needs of the customers? To help customers with individual requirements, I ask questions such as “Why is your company here?” Customers and the solutions that they use are becoming more sophisticated, it is true. HG Insights was founded with the goal of providing details to our customers about which technology a company uses. We were able to help companies develop more efficient sales and marketing strategies that increase their conversion rates. This kind of information was not available at large scale. We are still pioneers in this area, and are constantly looking for new ways to help customers. We also invest in innovation on a larger scale. A few years back, Elizabeth Cholawsky, the CEO, and I created “CoreIP”, a new initiative to invest in innovation. We set out to increase our market insights and data. We launched a patent program as part of the initiative. Four patents have been filed so far, and there are many more. It is our duty to innovate and lead in this area while staying true to our quality promise. HG provides deep insight into market trends, your competition and allows you confirm your need and to determine the scope of your GTM. 3. Please tell us about your patent program. We have four patents that you are currently pursuing. Can you also describe how these patents position you within the technology intelligence industry? The Inventions Program was created to encourage collaboration within the company. All products are open to collaboration. We welcome suggestions and ideas from all teams. We have filed four patents from that experience. A recent patent, for example, is an innovative method of performing named-entity resolution within a text. This allows us to better deambiguate and distinguish meanings. Let’s say you have a document that refers to Google. We are now left to ask: Does this document refer to Google as an entire company or just one product? It could be a abbreviation for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Is it Google Workspace, formerly G Suite? Context is everything in our modern world. This tool increases precision and coverage, which leads to higher ROI for customers. These are just a few of many patents we now have that allow us to make the most of our unmatched data. I always believe that a business prediction is useless unless it leads to an outcome. Are there other potential uses for data we are not aware of? Is there another industry that could benefit from your data as well? The internet is a treasure trove of data. We have insights and data derived from millions of technologies, so we often combine different pieces to make something new. We often combine insights that we have already mined with experimental analysis or new data points to generate new and actionable insights. This has resulted in two types of inventions. One is a novel technique or machine to mine data. Two are new insights: A patent for a method of predicting technology purchases. We also experiment constantly with new uses of our insights. These include trying to predict technology buying behavior at the location and department level, context data and profiling consultants and reseller loyalty to particular vendors or technologies. Customers can use this information to help them sort through all the data and find the relevant signals. Even though our primary focus is on B2B vendors, all of the technology we create can be used in other sectors, such as healthcare and financial services. 5. Final word: “Predictive” is an often used term in the big data space. How established are your skills with predictive analytics? You have a problem if nobody trusts your predictions or knows why they were made. Cognitive AI is based on this idea. Cognitive AI is a powerful tool for making predictions and showing customers why they were made. To
