Forbes.com has an article this week about Shadowing IT.  As Dan Woods puts it, “Fueled by their frustration with the solutions provided to them by corporate IT departments and by the power of readily available software tools via the Web, users have started creating their own solutions in the shadows.”  

These solutions should be embraced! 

One of the biggest differentiators these kinds of solutions offer is the ability to quickly deploy them!  Take for example intelligent Agents…  Intelligent Agent technologies offer the ability for the end-user (the business-user, the researcher, the analyst, portfolio manager, whoever he or she is) to quickly train and deploy personalized intelligent software Agents to carry out the time-consuming, tedious tasks of data aggregation and mining.  Agent technologies empower the end user, rather than burdening the IT department. This empowerment should be viewed as HELP, not HINDERANCE.  We see it as a cost-savings, an ROI to the bottom line! 

It may take an IT department months to spec-out a business case, put a system in place, test it thoroughly, and roll it out to their users.  By that time, the main purpose of the exercise may be lost or too much time may have passed for the full value of the application to be realized.  We all understand the need for governance.  We understand the need for policy.  But if the end user can create and deploy his or her own time-saving, ROI-producing application, why shouldn’t they? 

I believe in Shadowing IT and like to believe that intelligent Agents are just one of the many Web 2.0 technologies that enable “do-it-yourselfing,” in the shadows.  It’s about time these cost-saving, ROI-producing, productivity amplifying tools creep out of the shadows and take their share of the limelight.  These tools are valuable to the bottom-line and will continue to become more popular and prevalent in today’s competitive tech-savvy organizations.  These tools are not going to wilt in the sunlight, they are going to feed on the creativity and applicability of the business user and flourish into technologies that the most competitive companies and best IT departments will be clamoring to share with their users. 

Sell-side and independent research provide just a starting point for the buy-side. Finding unique and proprietary information has become more and more difficult. The Web is a gold mine of buried information nuggets. Buy-side professionals are challenged with finding the time to dig out and organize the relevant data. How can Connotate’s Agent Community GEN2 give buy-side professionals an advantage in this new environment? Over the last several months Connotate Agents have been building Fundamental Trends that are providing key insights for trading, including:   

• Falling Revenue – the paid job postings being made on major web portals and job sites are being monitored as a indicator of revenue. Several hundred data points are being gathered daily to build a time series perspective. One of the major sites, which has M&A discussions swirling around its parent, shows a 15% decline in job postings during the time period while one of its competitors shows a 4% growth and another competitor shows a 72% increase in job postings.    
• Pressure on a Sector – several major travel websites have shown a decline in web traffic. The information contributed to at least one short trade decision for the website with the largest decline in traffic.    
• Hiring - the job postings of the largest employers in the US (and other regions) are being monitored as an indicator of corporate performance. Thousands of data points are being collected on a daily basis to build a time series perspective. One company removed hundreds of job postings, approximately 10%, from its website several days before announcing weak earnings. Another firm removed 200 jobs (also approximately 10% of its total jobs available) just before it announced plans to shed $400b in assets. On the other hand, Connotate’s Agents report an increase of over 25% for a tech company’s job postings, consistent with a strong quarterly report from the company.    

Click on the chart below to enlarge the image and see where Agent results show dips in job postings. 

Bruce Molloy, CEO of Connotate was recently interviewed for inflight radio airing on several major airlines.

In the interview, Bruce describes how intelligent software Agents can be deployed throughout any enterprise to keep on track with market changes happening ever day and act as your front line of offense for gathering business intelligence.  A patented technology for using machine intelligence to extract, aggregate, mashup and mine data from across the Web and throughout the enterprise, intelligent software Agents work on behalf of the business user to carry out the tedious, time-consuming tasks that are a part of financial research, competive intelligence and business intelligence gathering.

With over 700 billion pages of data available from Web sources and tens of thousands of data silos across the enterprise, it’s an enormous task for any one person or any team to gain control and make sense of all that information.  Bruce explains how intelligent Agents enable a higher level of situational awareness and actionable intelligence that can help influence strategic decision-making in today’s competitive marketplace.  And the best part…  intelligent software Agents can be trained and deployed without any programming!

The interview mentions several high-level Agent application concepts.  Listen to the interview podcast.