Tips to Help Transform Unstructured Data into Business Intelligence
Most organizations have vast amounts of valuable business intelligence locked away in the depths of their data systems, but have not implemented proper BI tools. This wealth of valuable information that is literally just sitting there has the potential to become unlocked and utilized for valuable decision making.
Traditionally, BI tools were built to house information derived from structured data, which comes from relational databases and data warehouses. However, most companies have a wealth of unstructured data that is under-utilized, and this data contains vast amounts of information that can be used to make critical insights into customer and market trends.
Currently, there are many different BI software offerings designed to utilize the unstructured data, and they are often referred to as Operational Business Intelligence solutions. These applications provide users with faster and easier access to unstructured data than ever before, and this greatly impacts the strategic decision making process. Here are five points to consider when using Operational BI to mine through unstructured data.
1. Provide clients with tools that are easy to use and manage. This enables users to scour through data faster, to deliver much needed answers.
2. Instead of implementing multiple solutions to manage every BI process, look for a single BI solution that meets the necessary demands of the organization, so you can cut costs and implement one BI tool to reduce the mess that multiple solutions bring.
3. Capturing data in real-time ensures that data quality is accurately measured and can be used and analyzed much faster than ever before. This allows for quicker reactions to market and customer trends.
4. Using one centralized management system to enforce data retention, protection policies, and life cycle information. The use of one centralized system provides quantifiable ROI that is not scattered across multiple systems. This lowers costs, by keeping all of your information in one safe place.
5. Instead of taking the traditional approach and organizing data by location, take a new approach that organizes data by its business value. Traditional filing systems are not optimized for today’s dynamic business environment, organizing valuable data by its value allows for better capture of operational intelligence, and increases the economic benefit as well.
[Photo courtesy of datanami.]
