Posts Tagged ‘unstructured data’

The Union of Structured and Unstructured Data

Monday, August 15th, 2011

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking on a recent CXPA webinar “Gaining Customer Insights from Unstructured Data” along with CXPA co-founder and chair Bruce Temkin and Jason Schneider, vice president of enterprise sales at Clarabridge.  One thing that resonated was Jason’s comment that “the marriage of structured and unstructured data is the point of ultimate action for an organization.”

I would have to concur. The challenge many businesses face today though is that the information needed to support customers is scattered throughout the company.  Sales professionals, account management and customer support professionals have to log into 10 or more different applications trying to find information to help customers. According to Harris Interactive, even once information is found, 44% of customers claim that they received the wrong information. Added to this challenge is the phenomenal growth of unstructured data from internal blogs, content management systems, and customer survey responses as well as data captured outside the firewall from social media.

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Optimize Information Flow By Finding Expertise

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Larry Pruseck, Executive Director of the Institute for Knowledge Management, once said that the best knowledge management strategy is to “hire smart people and get them talking”. How do we make that happen in a corporation with a large and geographically diverse set of knowledge workers?  The challenge of using traditional search engine technology to find and share expertise includes:

  • People search or Who’s Who applications typically search and present data from a single content repository such as Seibel which usually has only structured information such as location, title, department, etc. (more…)

Symantec Feeling the IO Pressure

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Symantec’s recent announcement of its Data Insight product is a signal that the company sees an important opportunity to move up the value chain by delivering a richer set of business benefits to its customers.  It’s also another indication that the industry as a whole is starting to better understand the importance of Information Optimization (IO).

According to Symantec, Data Insight “enables organizations to improve data governance through insights into the ownership and usage of unstructured data.”  So, in part, their new product will be useful for their traditional risk mitigation business.  If you have better insight into your data assets, you can make smarter decision about what to protect—and respond more intelligently to breaches of your information security policies.

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