Opinion: Put Intelligence Where It Helps

As observed in the stories of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes,there’s more than one kind of intelligence. In an 1893 story by SirArthur Conan Doyle, “TheAdventure of the Greek Interpreter,” readers learn that Holmesadmires his older brother Mycroft for having superior powers ofobservation and deduction—while at the same time saying that Mycroftis “incapable” of applying those powers to the craft of detective work.

“If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from anarmchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that everlived. But he has no ambition and no energy,” Sherlock tells hiscolleague Dr. Watson. “He will not even go out of his way to verify hisown solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take thetrouble to prove himself right.” I found myself thinking of the paradoxof an intelligence that lacks the practical faculties of applicationafter speaking last week with Charles Nicholls, founder and CEO of SeeWhy Software.

SeeWhy announces this week the general release of its Enterprise Editionbusiness intelligence product, following an extended period of testingwith early adopter sites. As Nicholls told me during our conversation,”We want to change the way that people analyze data. There’s no reasontoday why people should analyze data that’s out of date, but it’sincredibly difficult to make the data warehouse anything else.”SeeWhy’s approach, he said, begins with a real-time event-driven enginefor recognizing and analyzing significant data blips, then couples itinto a message-oriented environment that lets developers apply theresults close to the point where they can have the greatest leverage.

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