Business Intelligence (BI) is increasingly being used by businesses for synthesizing data culled from many company databases to create reports and dashboards that can identify patterns and trends. BI has had its share of success, but it sometimes isn’t able to tell the whole story. That’s because BI is limited to analyzing structured data stored in databases. It doesn’t consider unstructured data.

By Dick Weisinger, on August 26th, 2010

Amount of unstructured data is growing rapidly

The amount of unstructured data is growing much more quickly than the amount of structured data. For example, there are significant sources of unstructured data being stored in organizations, particularly in documents and emails that are basically untapped by BI.

Blogs, twitter, Facebook

That’s not to mention information being created on blogs, Facebook pages, wikis and microblogging platforms like Twitter. A typical ratio of unstructured to structured data found in an organization is about 80:20. Unstructured data isn’t easy to analyze, and because of that, unstructured data hasn’t typically been included in the analysis of BI tools.

Enterprise Search

Unlike BI, Enterprise Search focuses on trying to uncover information held in unstructured data, but there are limitations as to what search can do.

Unstructured data a stumbling block

While analysis of unstructured data still remains a stumbling block, recently vendors are trying to at least unite the worlds of BI and Enterprise search to provide a more comprehensive approach for finding business information and understanding important trends and patterns in that data. The result is something that is being called Unified Information Access (UIA).

One-field search

Most Enterprise Search solutions try to mimic the simple one-field search method popularized by Google and are more recently also including faceted search as an option. On the other hand, BI applications tend to have much more complex interfaces for specifying analysis criteria, often requiring many pages of options to be completed.

UIA gives support for analytics

Using UIA, analytic results are improved because unstructured data can be brought in as backup information to support the conclusions of the analytics.

Source (for the whole story): FormTek Blog