Unified Information: The Foundation for Better Insight and Decisions
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. This paper explores the legacy technologies that influenced the development of both the new generation of search engines and the more powerful unified information access platforms. It also explains the benefits this new approach brings in providing active intelligence on demand and suggests some paths to achieving the highest returns on information assets. |