Standard & Poor's has been working hard lately to align their capabilities more with the real-world decision support needs of their investor clients, so their announced plan to acquire Capital IQ, Inc. comes as no great surprise in terms of direction but a very pleasant one in terms of quality and emphaisis. Capital IQ is a powerful desktop analysis tool that facilitates both financial analysis and the complex human relationships and activities oftentimes required to complete financial deals and manage portfolios and sales prospects. It has a highly intuitive interface to high-quality fundamental data and research, a deep and wide business taxonomy extended well beyond standard industry SIC codes, drill-down research tools, project management and relationship management tools. Many financial content products talk workflow and some do it pretty well but Capital IQ goes further than most to look at the business of generating value in financial transactions from the human and market side on in rather than from specific data sets on out. As Standard & Poor's searches for a better front end to leverage its own deep analytical relationships with the financial industry it could hardly do better with Capital IQ for its own good - even as other traditional financial publishers wonder what good ideas are left to purchase.