Unstructured Data and Enterprise Architecture

Everyone is talking about "big data," and there is a new rush to see who can provide the best tools for mining Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

Ironically, the "big data" (or unstructured content) inside organizations is far more valuable and just as invisible without special technology. The Contelligence group designs, develops, and helps customers implement that technology.

It may seem strange to think of your content as big data, or even as a minable resource that can surpass the value of social media mining. The fact is that there are millions of pages of unstructured content on large corporate networks and vast number of executive priorities depend on this content and are difficult or impossible without it: Business Intelligence, IP monetization, risk management, mobile applications, process automation; and the list goes on. Consider these examples:

  • The number of characters in an FDA new drug submission equals about 14 million tweets. The unstructured nature of this content can delay processes and cost millions of dollars per day in lost revenue.
  • Corporate email users send and receive approximately 80 billion emails per day. This content is for the most part unstructured, un-minable, and impossible to govern effectively. The financial risk to organizations is incalculable.
  • The content of the 300 million daily tweets claimed by Twitter equals about two million pages of corporate documents. Which has more potential to revolutionize business?
  • Homeland Security creates 500,000 pages of reports and briefings daily. Unstructured content leads to what President Obama called, "a failure to connect the dots," the same problem faced by most organizations today.

Content as unstructured data is everywhere across the enterprise--Microsoft Office documents, email, instant messaging, and increasingly in the new Social Enterprise applications. The Contelligence Group helps organizations make unstructured data a visible and active part of the enterprise data architecture by:

  • Improving the quality of the data itself with tools that are transparent to the user
  • Providing an enterprise architecture for analyzing and processing unstructured data

Improving the quality of the data itself with tools that are transparent to the user