8 Key Requirements for Choosing a Unified Information Access Vendor

Improving Insight and Results by Unifying Information

A critical challenge in improving organizational performance is cost-effectively providing access to all the relevant information people need to make a decision or complete a process, regardless of source or format. Not only is information dispersed across incompatible silos, obstructing simple access to insight, but the volume of data, documents and other forms of content continues to grow exponentially. While some application vendors address the problem by expanding the types of information each application can manage, this approach invariably omits critical sources and typically underserves users’ expectations for simplicity and fit to their business problem. The best practice is not creating an overwhelming ocean of all your information, but using an index, relevancy models and analytics to provide virtual pools of all the right information for each purpose.

The technology that can provide this responsive approach to information delivery is unified information access (UIA), a platform that converges data, content and analytics with alerts, workflow and automatic information delivery to a variety of interactive interfaces and applications. UIA also acts as the information foundation for projects such as integrating SharePoint content with other repositories and proactively managing regulatory compliance. 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.