Many business intelligence (BI) solutions are falling short because of their inability to analyse unstructured data.
This is the view of independent consultant, Bill Hoggarth, who points out that certain aspects of BI have not changed: “We are still making the same promises of BI that we've been making for years, promising businesses information at their fingertips - the only thing that has changed is the name of the box.
“There's a huge amount of value that has been developed through enterprise repositories. But the crystal ball promises most BI vendors are making are a long way from reality.”
During the ITWeb BI Summit from 23 to 25 February at the Forum, in Bryanston, Hoggarth will identify the challenges of bringing together structured and unstructured data in an enterprise-wide BI strategy.
Hoggarth says one of the main reasons why many BI solutions fail is because unstructured data spread throughout an organisation cannot be analysed by the BI system.
Distributed data
As much as 80% of an organisation's information originates in an unstructured form, according to Merrill Lynch, the investment banking division of Bank of America. This unstructured data is comprised of e-mails, presentations, spreadsheets, images, and multimedia files being stored in file servers.
This information explosion has resulted in companies spending huge amounts of money and resources storing and protecting data, but not getting any value from it. According to global research firm Gartner, IT can spend up to 40% of its time managing this information.
“Around 80% of an organisation's data cannot technically be put into a BI system,” explains Hoggarth. “If we don't start thinking about unstructured data now, it will really start impacting businesses in 2011 and 2012.”
Hoggarth adds: “Information is going to grow and the costs of managing this information are going to sky-rocket. Most of the growth the big BI vendors have seen has been driven by governance, risk, and compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.”
On a positive note, Hoggarth says one of the biggest trends is the emergence of XML documents, as well as content and document management systems, which he says are showing signs of maturity.
This brings unstructured data into the realm of structured data, which can be analysed by modern BI solutions.
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