The principle of continuous improvement is fundamental to the growth and success of all businesses, but none more so than online information services. Our services are essentially a suite of connected applications that work in unison to perform complex processes and as such they require constant auditing and diligence to

In the 1990s, large manufacturers spent millions on software to streamline their supply chains, and they continue to invest in refining processes to make those supply chains as efficient as possible. For those companies whose business is the manufacturing and sale of information, the redesign of “data supply chains” came

The idea of harnessing work as a utility (i.e, like flicking a switch to turn on labor “power”) is gaining traction. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins recently included it in her list of technology trends to watch (one of the few surprises in that presentation) and Gary Swart, CEO of

Our daily lives are filled with processes. We renew our driver’s licenses, fill out healthcare claims, and play games based on rules understood by the players. Most processes we do regularly are painless, or at worst a source of annoyance. A really poorly designed process, however, can have wide-reaching, serious

Last week we saw two great cases at IEI where “data exhaust” — data created incidentally as part of a particular data management process — turned out to hold great value for our customers. In both cases we took simple telephone verification processes designed just to confirm that an executive’s contact information was still