Attivio | Unified Information Access Blog

Early awareness enables quick action. Discovering issues before they become problems and being the first to know important information is always an advantage - especially when you can turn that insight into action. When the information you need is drawn from multiple sources and is derived from analytical processes, the speed and accuracy of the information depends on the technology that delivers it.

Many companies rely on Business Intelligence (BI) to provide a composite view of enterprise data and a framework for making well-informed business decisions. BI and other data-driven applications have helped businesses improve transactions and manage massive data volumes. Because of their central importance, data applications and the data structures that support them are a major focus of IT. But as global markets move faster, data volume explodes, and data buried in documents, emails, web sites, etc., becomes increasingly important, companies are bumping up against the limits of these applications.

Unified information access (UIA) is emerging as a core technology for dramatically improving the value of existing BI and data warehouse applications. UIA, which unites textual content with traditional data in a universal index, does more than incorporate documents into data applications. UIA also provides easy-to-use search user paradigms and faster information availability. Together, these capabilities deliver broader, deeper, and more-timely insight.

UIA also includes these capabilities:

• Unified, well-related information to drive actions and applications

• Pattern detection and proactive analysis across disparate information sources

• Better user experience - more than just improved usability:

  • Access to complete, actionable information

  • Advanced exploration capabilities

  • The flexibility to discover answers to questions you didn't expect to ask

• Complete, relevant, and connected insight available on demand so you can confidently act in time

One of the most powerful advantages of adding UIA to data applications is that with UIA, you don't have to create another data mart and carefully model all relationships in advance. You don't have to restrict exploration to only the possibilities considered during the planning phase.

UIA can add significant value to BI in more than one way. Here are two scenarios that increase the value of your existing investments:

1. When you need to improve the user experience and business value of existing BI applications, you can add UIA to:

• Integrate diverse content (website content, documents, emails, etc.) to improve the relevancy of query results

• Simplify exploration and retrieval by adding a search interface and advanced search methods (faceted navigation, heat maps, tag clouds) to reveal related information as users examine topics

The existing data warehouse is augmented by the UIA universal index, which allows you to include content sources without relying on the data warehouse and without having to force the content into a tabular form. The complex ETL process required for populating BI applications is avoided because you don't have to fit the content into a predefined table structure. Instead content is indexed and entities are extracted so all relevant information is quickly retrieved in response to a query.

2. When you have a new BI project, when you need to enhance the data mart with content from any other sources (web content, text, etc.), or when you need deeper analytics, instead of building another data mart or redesigning an existing one, you can use UIA to enhance your existing data warehouse and BI.

You not only gain the flexibility and user experience advantages and inclusion of content and text analytics, you also get faster time to value because you can design and build UIA applications much more quickly than creating a data mart or designing and building traditional database applications. (Learn more about this rapid prototyping and deployment capability in Accelerate Innovation & Productivity with Rapid Prototyping and Development)

Companies that are positioned to take advantage of the fast-moving global economy are the ones that empower their people with the means they need to stay ahead by acting quickly and surely. This confidence is fueled by the insight people gain from the availability of agile technologies such as UIA.

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