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Although enterprises commonly utilize business intelligence (BI) tools against structured data for analysis and decision making, leading organizations recognize that they must take a more holistic view of their information assets and find ways to creatively analyze the exponentially growing universe of unstructured content - contracts, press releases, filings, forms, call center notes, medical records, insurance claims, web content, emails, etc. This white paper describes how the Clarabridge Content Mining Platform avoids the pitfalls of previous approaches to unstructured analysis, and capitalizes on lessons learned from solving similar problems in the structured domain. A platform approach enables enterprises to efficiently and effectively source, transform, store, and analyze unstructured data alongside structured data - in a way that is easy to manage. The result is broader business understanding, the ability to leverage existing resources, and the freedom to rapidly apply the most appropriate decision support interface.
Executive Summary
It is becoming ever more important for today's agile enterprise to use the best available data to drive strategic and operational business decisions. Although most companies deploy business intelligence (BI) tools against structured data to answer a wide variety of questions, leading organizations are increasingly recognizing that they must take a more holistic view of their information assets. They find creative ways to analyze the exponentially growing universe of unstructured content - contracts, press releases, research papers, filings, call center notes, medical records, insurance claims, web content, emails, etc. This content when understood and analyzed alongside structured data provides business insight that enables organizations to better serve customers, control cost and risk, compete effectively, and drive profitability.
Organizations should have the infrastructure, storage, and user interfaces to process and efficiently explore large volumes of data. And they need to easily leverage their existing BI and data warehousing (DW) tools presently used only for structured data analyses, to analyze unstructured data alongside structured data.
As organizations adopt analytical approaches to unstructured data, they will need to address a number of challenges:
- Data comes from multiple unstructured repositories (file servers, document management systems, intranet sites, internet sites, database notes fields, etc.)
- Data in unstructured documents is of widely varying quality (often much more so than structured)
- The use of different types of unstructured data tools varies greatly from environment to environment and from problem to problem.
- In many cases maximum value in analyzing unstructured data comes from analyzing it alongside existing structured data in data marts or data warehouses
Fortunately, many of the challenges with unstructured data analytics can be overcome by applying lessons from the BI and DW sectors. Over the past 10 years departmental, point solutions of the early 1990's rapidly evolved to more robust solutions that leveraged enterprise data warehousing platforms, an extract, transform, and load (ETL) infrastructure, and scalable, server-based BI or reporting solutions.
To be successful in the unstructured world, organizations need a platform to leverage their existing BI investments and also efficiently and effectively source, transform, store, and analyze unstructured data - and do so in a way that is easy to manage and scale. That was the vision behind the Clarabridge Content Mining Platform. The Clarabridge Content Mining Platform enables enterprises to:
- Source.
- Transform.
- Store.
- Analyze.
- Manage.
Using the Clarabridge Content Mining Platform enables users to directly mine text alongside existing structured data, using standard BI tools and analysis techniques, to address a host of real-world business needs. The benefits are enormous and include:
- Broader analysis capabilities.
- Faster ROI.
- Rapid time-to-value.
Tapping Unstructured Data to Drive Business Value
Organizations today are buried in unstructured content such as contracts, press releases, research papers, forms, filings, call center notes, medical records, insurance claims, web content, emails, etc. Experts agree this content represents more than 80% of an organization's data. And the amount is growing every day. Furthermore, in an increasingly services-based economy, unstructured transcripts, notes and documents describing business activity provide important insights about customer's habits, tastes, product use and support requirements, employee work habits and performance, and business process efficiencies and failures.
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