From Big Data to Extreme Information Management

Without question, the hottest business technology topic today is Big Data — data in volumes so large, it strains the limits of traditional data management technologies. At the same time, the volume of unstructured content (documents, email, knowledge bases, web pages, etc.) dwarfs the amount of traditional structured data.

The whitepaper explores the business value of Extreme Information, a significantly wider enterprise issue above and beyond Big Data alone.

Improving Insight and Results by Unifying Information

Unified information access platforms can address many needs. Often organizations start with one specific use, with a phased plan to expand UIA adoption more broadly. When selecting a UIA platform, it’s critical to future-proof your investment by considering not just current requirements but also the capabilities you’ll need as you implement additional projects and initiatives. This paper provides guidelines for selecting the right UIA platform, whether you are looking to deliver a specific application or support multiple uses across your organization.

Using Actionable Insight to Strengthen Customer Relationships

This white paper explores how you can improve customer experience management with unified information access, a platform that enhances your information-management capabilities by converging data, content and text analytics with alerts, workflow and automatic information delivery to a variety of interactive interfaces and applications, ensuring the timely insight and ability to act that gives your organization the competitive edge in customer loyalty.

The Five Steps to Comprehensive Information Management

Organizations that are ready to advance to a unified, consumption-centered approach will be most successful when they adopt a comprehensive information management strategy and map out a plan for improvements that are both phased and continuous. This paper provides an assessment tool and unified information access maturity model that includes the typical capabilities at each phase and the advantages of committing to progressive improvements in optimizing information availability.

Authored by MIT Sloan Management Review

According to a new MIT Sloan Management Review report, over the next two years, executives say they will focus on supplementing standard historical reporting with emerging approaches that make information come alive. These include data visualization and process simulation, as well as text and voice analytics, social media analysis, and other predictive and prescriptive techniques. The research identifies a new five-point methodology for successfully implementing analytics-driven management for rapidly creating value. The report, which was co-sponsored by Attivio, is based on a study of nearly 3,000 executive managers worldwide, as well as in-depth interviews with leading researchers.

Authored by Brian Babineau, Senior Consultant, Enterprise Strategy Group

Almost every line of business and support function is experiencing rapid change in their respective applications and data sources; more applications are being delivered via cloud or Software-as-a-Service; semi-structured applications such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server are being used for everything from content portals to file share replacements; and public content, thanks to social networking and rating sites, is often an influence when making business decisions. This paper examines how organizations must constantly think about new ways to integrate and enrich information, accounting for all the new data sources and the desire to interact with data in real time.

How Agile Organizations Improve Insight and Accelerate Information-Driven Processes

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.

Authored by Dr. Barry Devlin, 9Sight Consulting

In this paper, Dr. Barry Devlin, one of the foremost authorities on business insight and data warehousing, first shows data and content as two ends of a continuum of the same business information asset and then explores the depth of integration required for full business value. The business outcome is analytics that combine the precision of data querying with the relevance of content search, independent of the information source and structure.

Authored by Mark Albala, InfoSight Partners

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.

Authored by Seth Grimes, Alta Plana Corporation

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.

Recovering Margins by Rechanneling Your Content and Centering on Audiences

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. This whitepaper takes a look at these opportunities and explores how unified information access can help online media companies.

Model New Ideas, Land More Business, Control Costs

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. Download this whitepaper to learn how Attivio AIE is the platform of choice for unified information access and search-based applications.

Gaining Advantage from Unified Information Access

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 whitepaper discusses approaches to overcoming these challenges through the use of unified information access.

Better Insight Into Customers Improves Retention

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. This paper discusses how unified information access can help you build a strong understanding of your customer landscape.

Precision and Recall

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? To those of us immersed in the thick of search lore, we have lots of answers but we certainly don’t make them easy to understand to the uninitiated. There is quite a large wall around our little garden. In this paper, we hope to demystify the discussion a bit by focusing on the tradeoff that is inherent between the two concepts in context of how it applies to real world examples.

Understanding the facts about Enterprise Search

Many people think that since enterprise search has been around for years, all its issues should have been solved and its complexity dramatically reduced. In other words, it ought to be a commodity by now. Although search technologies continue to advance, the origin of the complexity is the nature of language itself – full of ambiguity, contradiction, multiple meanings, and many contexts.

Unified Information: The Foundation for Better Insight and Decisions

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.

Why the Management Process Fails Today

Why are CIOs spending so much time and energy on Business Intelligence (BI)? These technologies are the platform for communicating, managing and measuring strategic, operational and tactical performance. The issue is that although organizations are spending a lot of time and money on implementing and evolving these systems, the systems are still failing to meet the needs of companies to accurately assess the drivers of strategic outcomes. Systems that enable a process to link the measurement and management of drivers to outcomes are the next generation of BI and performance management technologies.

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.