With the new year officially kicking off today, at least for the business world, what better reason to do yet *another* post early on — this one about what I think is a big coming trend.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, in my professional life, about how companies will increasingly find it necessary to mine various types of knowledge bases, both within and without its corporate walls. Call it what you will: knowledge mining, intelligence mining, whatever. It’s a very good bet for attention and focus this year, for a number of reasons.

Let’s start with the exploding storehouse of valuable data in the blogosphere. Yes, there is value out there, somewhere, if you can only filter out all the chaff. And what a job that is! But marketers, of which I am one, know this is an area they cannot afford to ignore (esp those in consumer-products companies) — to find what people are saying about their firm or their products. PR people, too, have high interest here. There’s no doubt it’s another form of consumer market research for the marketers, and an added way for the PR profession to gauge public perceptions and attitudes — if only they had the tools to make this daunting task easier. Well, those are coming, folks — in droves. Here’s just one that was announced recently, as summarized in an article in KM World (that’s about Knowledge Management, for the uninitiated). It’s about a new offering from Biz360 and Feedster called “BlogView,” to help marketers glean intelligence from the “increasing volume of blog and Wiki content discussing their company, products, competitors and trends that affect their business.”

But that’s not the only type of intelligence mining that companies will be increasingly doing. “Email mining” is another, in my humble opinion — this time, inside the firewall. Though many in the blogosphere would have you believe that blogs are the killer app in business communications, that remains to be seen. Email still holds that throne and won’t be leaving soon. A recent report published by IDC on the future of email talks about the “crucial role for email throughout the collaboration process.” And it raises the possibility that email content may “parallel that of other enterprise application data and business processes.” Thus, you’d better believe that smart companies are now — or will soon be — mining this internal treasure trove of knowledge, for a whole lot of reasons. In fact, they already are for legal or compliance purposes — that is, using the advanced search techniques provided by new email archiving software solutions to very quickly retrieve specific emails required for compliance audits or legal discovery. (These solutions — which range from complex enterprise apps requiring bigtime integration, to outsourced/hosted services, to simple internal “appliances” that do the job, plug-and-play — came about simply because companies had to produce emails fast when ordered to, or risk huge fines and penalties by regulatory agencies and courts.)

Email volume is growing rapidly — more than doubling over the past two years according to IDC. And, typically, a company’s total data is now more than 80% of the “unstructured” variety, according to Enterprise Strategy Group, which of course includes that rapidly growing category of email.

I postulate that, as companies are now actively learning how to mine their email knowledge base for the above “reactive” reasons, they will naturally expand the practice to more “proactive” uses — that is, to mine intelligence that can improve or speed product development, marketing, human resources administration, customer support, and all kinds of other positive, business uses. The key, as I see it, is that, while email (including attachments) is fast increasing as a percentage of the “corporate memory,” the critical *value* of it to the corporation goes up even faster.

Who wouldn’t want to be able to mine that knowledge base for all its worth? So, it may not be long before you see that “email mining appliance” plugged in and humming away in your company’s server room, too.