Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3-1: In this desired graph, lines indicate the relationships between
individual people. The color and width of the line add extra information.
This graph data is not automatically available. Even with the best sales force
automation system, there may be many elements outside of the system.
There is likely a wide range of data available, including many documents
(such as proposals, technical literature, pricing guides, and answers to
questions), relationship databases, and many communications (such as
hundreds or thousands of e-mails, phone calls, attachments, video
conferences, and other interactions with the customer). None of these data
sources is in a nice graph data set, but some of the communications have
connections between people.
Consider e-mail data. For each e-mail, a list of people is identified in the
To, From, and Cc fields that represent connections between people. For
example, if someone is Cc'd in many e-mails, you might conclude that
particular person is significant. From a set of e-mails, you can extract a
graph. In Figure 3-1 , you can see that Ann only connects with Ben on
e-mails (indicated by a line between Ann and Ben). In addition to the graph
of people and the connections, additional data provides additional useful
insights. For example, in Figure 3-1 more e-mails exist where Ben and Tim
are both included (indicated by a thicker line).
 
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