Authored by Seth Grimes, Alta Plana Corporation
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. |