The impact of Unified Information Access (UIA) in improving the agility of information-driven business processes begins by bridging information silos to unite content and data in one index, which enables powerful solutions and applications that offer more complete insight. This paper also details how UIA helps companies cost-effectively provide comprehensive information availability to support business goals.

Whether interacting with a customer or engaging in an internal process, getting the information you need to perform effectively and efficiently is often a challenge. There are two types of obstacles to having what you need to know available quickly: the details you need are rarely all in one place and all in the same format; and the information is often not well related, so you don’t get the insight you need directly from the information as it is presented. For example, if you retrieve a customer order, you also want to know how valuable the customer is to your business, whether there have been complaints in the past, if there are any unresolved issues, what offers have motivated them, etc.

Those familiar with Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing understand that the ever-increasing demand for relevant information, the accelerated pace of business activity and wide-spread resistance to further investment in traditional BI solutions have created the need for a more flexible means of providing information availability. This paper explores a next phase of business intelligence that places the emphasis on immediacy and action.

One key to this new model, which author Mark Albala calls Post-Discovery, is replacing the reliance on data models as the fixed navigation scheme used for storing, reporting and analyzing information with a new capability that shifts the perspective to one of an enabler for responsive information accessed through a new paradigm that enables agile, insightful, pro-active decisions.

Search and business intelligence (BI) operate in parallel worlds. Search helps users retrieve documents of interest, whereas BI supports data analyses that create business value from information in databases. Search is simple to use, but results — hit lists rather than answers — often lack business relevance and usefulness. BI is powerful, but decades after spreadsheets and reporting first appeared, applications remain inflexible and difficult to use. Further, the estimated 80% of business-useful information that originates in unstructured form is not accessible via conventional BI tools and approaches.

In "Unified Information Access: Gain Active Intelligence from Content and Data," noted analytics strategy consultant and author Seth Grimes explores how Unified Information Access (UIA) combines the simplicity of enterprise search and the analytical power of BI. Mr. Grimes explains how UIA goes beyond the two parallel approaches by recognizing common definitions and relationships in disparate sources and dynamically fusing results. Building on its BI heritage, UIA is about more than just information retrieval. UIA allows the user to explore, filter, and manipulate retrieved data via interactive platform capabilities. True UIA platforms also provide support for a variety of information-driven applications and solutions and offer rapid prototyping and deployment to minimize risk and speed time to market.

Creativity is the heart of content development and the core value of publishers and broadcast media. Revenue models, distribution methods, and production tools continue to change, but the skilled work of writers, photographers, editors and producers are based on creative insight and training in investigation and presentation. As media companies adapt to the disruptions in revenue and distribution models driven by the internet, firm ground is located where that creativity can be supported by agility in operations and integrated methods of revenue generation.

Distribution transformation is driving the inevitable change in revenue models for publications. Legacy models of content distribution are converging on the web, erasing the edges between newspapers, magazines, television and the internet. While this is disruptive, it is also an opportunity to create new outlets for content distribution.

Enabling technologies allow you to discover new avenues for distributing your content without sacrificing creativity and professional standards. Thriving in the world of web-based distribution also requires an unsentimental mindset that embraces new possibilities for the content business.

Today, development teams typically need hundreds of person hours to develop an application or to fully integrate a new platform. Prototypes and Proofs of Concept (PoC) also take many weeks (or even months) to develop. If you could significantly reduce these timeframes, you would accelerate time to market and expedite PoCs and rollouts. This advantage saves money and reduces the risk of missing features, late deliveries or inadequate testing.

Not only is development an expensive undertaking, but the amount of time invested also limits the amount of innovation. With shorter development cycles, you gain the time and flexibility to experiment, to model new ideas, to consider adding new customer-requested features that weren't in the original plan, and to continuously improve your applications through rapid prototyping.

Over the past decade, development teams have adopted new programming methods to try to reduce development time. Today, a new generation of platforms in the application stack is designed to both deliver a specific layer of functionality and enable rapid prototyping, allowing development teams to focus their efforts on the value they add and gain time for more innovation.

As the owner of an online media website, your biggest challenge is delivering a distinctive site that is the primary destination for your target audience. You need both compelling content and an engaging user experience so your site stands out and attracts the maximum number of loyal readers who are valuable prospects for your advertisers.

This challenge is exacerbated by the plethora of competing sites, the ease of reader switching, and the need to reduce operations costs. You may be facing obstacles to aggregating information across your properties and transitioning more of your content to the web. The downward trend in advertising revenues also makes it difficult to maintain content standards and justify investments that enable innovation.

Companies should focus on customer loyalty during a difficult economy to protect revenue and ensure the continuation of the most important customer relationships. Innovative technologies can consolidate information about customers and their opinions from all relevant sources, providing cost-effective, customer-centric insight that gives every customer representative the 360° view of the customer that ensures excellent service. When the technology includes workflow and automated alerts, you can reduce costs and improve service and customer insight.

Precision and recall. These terms are bandied about in most every discussion about search. What do they really mean and how do we evaluate them?

Search is an instance of what we call a decision problem.  All decision problems share certain fundamental properties.  Whether we are finding the correct spelling of a term in a query, deciding whether audio is noise or speech, or determining whether a noun phrase is worthy of being a navigator for exploration, we can measure the quality of a proposed solution.  Two of the standard metrics are precision and recall.

In this Attivio Whitepaper we uncover and correct some of the myths, assumptions and misconceptions that prevail in the Enterprise Search market today.

In a world of exploding business information and increasing global competition, companies struggle to manage and take best advantage of their information assets. To compound these challenges, until recently there has been no unified method or technology for retrieval across incompatible sources, such as databases, websites and text repositories. Data is accessed via database applications, such as BI and CRM; the content in document files, emails and web postings is located using enterprise search. Without unified access, people are left to hand-stitch data and text gathered by disparate means or - worse - some important input is simply not included. But today companies can become more agile and competitive by adopting unified information access (UIA), a new level of retrieval and delivery technology that ensures all relevant information is automatically identified and quickly assembled to support action.

Over the past couple of decades, dual information architectures have evolved for corporate information analysis. For ‘structured’ content, most companies now use a traditional analytic infrastructure: transactional source systems feeding operational data stores, data warehouses, and/or data marts, with a BI application sitting on top to present and analyze the information. For ‘unstructured’ content, some companies also maintain a parallel environment with content such as MS Word, Excel, and other content stored in a content, records, or document management system, usually with some kind of portal interface with search functionality that allows users to locate the content they are searching for.

The new generation of information applications will bring search and BI together. Find out how.

Reprinted with permission of Enterprise Strategy Group

This paper discusses the challenges that organizations will face as electronic discovery becomes commonplace — in addition to how these issues can be mitigated with a search technology solution that goes beyond basic keyword queries. ESG recently uncovered that 41%1 of North American senior legal officers expect their electronic discovery budgets to increase. In order to keep these budgets from growing out of control, investments in technology that can keep up with digital information growth will be a necessity. For those corporate counsels who believe that their budgets will remain flat or decrease, their only hope, in ESG’s opinion, is to make big bets on the right technology. Picking the right search solution is a good place to start...