Recent years have shown a paradigm shift in the way organizations rely on information to help make key business decisions. In the past, organizations relied on past performance numbers and transactional data to define how it has performed over time and thereby provide competitive insights. However, these organizations have soon realised that data alone cannot be completely relied on for driving businesses. An amazing level of detailed business intelligence can be found in an organization’s unstructured content. In fact, about 80 % of enterprise-relevant information originates in “unstructured” data such as Emails, Blogs, Surveys, Transaction documents etc. And thus the surge of interest in Content Analytics!
Content Analytics- What is it?
Gartner defines Content Analytics as ”a family of technologies that processes digital content and user behaviour in consuming and engaging with content, such as documents, news sites, customer conversations (both audio and text), and social network discussions, to answer specific questions.”
In short, Content analytics can be defined as unlocking business value from an organization’s unstructured content. Content Analytics via semantic technological tools are often used to help generate answers to important business questions. For Eg: an organization can understand why there has been a sudden drop in sales of one of its products or even predict the downturn by relying on Content Analytics. There is a huge hidden potential in text or content which can be explored and leveraged to help enterprises make strategic decisions. Although this has led to a surge of interest in Content Analytics, the latest ‘Hype Cycle for Analytics’ from Gartner indicates that it will take another few years to reach the ‘Plateau of Productivity’ in terms of steady state adoption. This indicates that although enterprises realize the power of content analytics, they have had a tough time adopting it for various reason. This is where organizations can rely on EIM technologies to help firms adopt Content Analytics as part of their business strategy. EIM provides the base platform to capture/mine, store, organize and manage information before it can be analysed.
EIM and Content Analytics:
EIM solutions can be used to solve enterprise issues in managing both structured and unstructured data and turn them into strategic assets. Often, extracting knowledge from structured data is easy as they reside in a machine readable format. These data reside in organizational databases in predefined categories or data models and hence they can be ‘mined’ to generate key insights. In the past, Business Intelligence tools have proved very effective in such reporting and analysis of structured data. Unstructured data, on the other hand, is an all-new ballgame! Enterprises are flooded with content such as paper documents, emails, text, audio/video etc. EIM solutions can be used to convert such unstructured content into machine-readable structured content and thereon use basic business intelligence and analytical tools to leverage the information residing in them.
Text data is a classic example of unstructured data. For eg: a supplier invoice document or a Customer feedback document are swarmed with text. Text processing technology can be used to extract meaning out of key information residing in them, transform them into structured data and then gather business insights by processing them.
Sentiment Analysis is another such powerful methodology to extract meaningful information from documents and other unstructured content. Sometimes referred to as opinion mining, sentiment analysis, analyses documents using Natural Language Processing (NLP), statistics or any other machine learning methods. It then extracts information from the sentences and texts contained within such documents. The extracted information is then weighted for ‘opinions’ or ‘sentiments’ gathered along a positive-negative spectrum. Life science Industry is one such industry which has garnered a lot of benefits from sentiment analytics based decisions. OpenText, a leading provider of EIM solutions, have a plethora of offerings in the Content Analytics space. OpenText Content Analytics is a multilingual advanced search and analytics platform which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) software that allows the extraction of meaningful information from unstructured content all the while reducing content-related costs.
Benefits from Content Analytics:
- Create machine-readable content from unstructured data
- Connect people and processes with the right content
- Discover business drivers and gather key business insights
- Support strategic decision making & provide competitive advantage.
- Reduce business risk and improve operational efficiency
Unstructured Content has the potential the power to define smarter decisions. By unlocking the true value of such content and by leveraging the business insights gathered, organizations around the globe can harness its true business potential. Avaali is a leading provider of Enterprise Information Management solutions and engages with enterprise customers the world over to assess their unstructured content and put in place long term EIM strategies and technologies; including appropriate content analytics solutions that can help them take their businesses to the next level.