What have you googled today?

What have you googled today? Tom Austin says google could be useful to show "googled" (valuable) caller information when someone calls you.

Googling
Posted By: Tom Austin, GVP & Gartner Fellow

The word is now part of our vocabulary, or so says the popular press as well as Wikipedia. It's a verb that means to perform a Web search on a person's name. Twenty-somethings google each other before they go out. Salespeople google their clients to get insights and gems to use on sales calls. Patients google their doctors, and investors google their stockbrokers (if they use any - something they are far less likely to do these days).

So why can't you google someone down the hall - in your own company - and find something meaningful to your business activities? Why can't you google the people from finance you have a meeting with in two hours? Why can't you google your company's transaction history when a happy customer calls up and wants to chat about an order she just placed with a different division of your company? Why can't your voice-over-IP system google all incoming calls and match up caller-ID information with everything and anything related to the caller?

Isn't it about time we started working on figuring out how to help people inside our own companies find structured and unstructured information about people and relationships between people? Not just by navigating a set of fields populated by a "dumb" human resource management system, but by intelligently probing for value in information (often tacit knowledge) that IT systems could crawl day in and day out - systems ranging from e-mail, through file servers, to content management and production.

http://hpw.blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?blogid=3