I use to work at a large firm where everyone had large lists of contacts, old clients, leads, etc. It was always a dream to have a system where all of this data could be entered, and then the system tells us where commonalities are. For example:

You're at a conference and you meet someone, getting their business card. Come back to the office and enter that information into the CRM. If you've added that person on LinkedIn, the software will scrape this data, and compare it against all other data sets in the system. In this example let's say this particular contact once worked at a company that is also a former client. The system should alert and say hey, so-and-so has x connections with other records.

This is probably more data that you wanted, but the larger problem was silos. We were constantly pushing employees to "compare notes" because we never knew when two or more employees might uncover information/contacts/etc. that if linked, could help us leverage that data.