Information insight for your business

Companies are under constant pressure. To survive in a fiercely competitive market, they don’t just want to be better, faster, and more efficient, they have to be. That’s exactly why it’s becoming increasingly crucial for companies to understand exactly what information is available and, more importantly, how to make it available in real time.

Three types of data – one goal

There are three different types of data that are relevant from a business perspective. These include structured and semi-structured data, as well as unstructured data. All this data has to be searchable, understandable, and analyzable.

Depending on the type of data, this can be a difficult undertaking or a relatively simple one. For instance, if all you want to do is analyze structured data, you won’t be up against too much of a challenge nowadays. That data is generally managed data that has been stored in databases. In other words, its contents are depicted in predefined fields and its semantics are known. This makes it relatively straightforward to analyze and process.

Semi-structured and unstructured data, on the other hand, present some challenges. Those data types include e-mails, voice messages, videos, audio files, contracts, and posts on social networks. In short, it’s the kind of data that is generated during typical communications between people. Understanding it is thus a bit tricky, because – as its name implies – there aren’t any predefined structures. In most cases it’s stored randomly in various file systems or in the cloud.

The result: The data in the company can’t be intelligently linked, meaning that existing knowledge that is actually available is lost. Bearing in mind that some 80% of enterprise data is made up of unstructured data, that would be a tremendous loss.

In order to leverage all of the business-critical data – including semi-structured and unstructured data – employees would have to search through all of the existing systems one by one to find the information they need. In a digital world with a vast amount of steadily accumulating data, that’s obviously just not expedient any more, much less in sync with the times. Thanks to new tools for analytics and ongoing advances in semantic understanding and machine learning, companies now have fresh opportunities to evaluate unstructured data and fully harness its enormous potential for every single aspect of their business.

Several of our customers have already optimized their in-house knowledge management using Mindbreeze InSpire. Are you interested in a demo that is precisely tailored to your requirements? We’re looking forward to hearing from you.