How to Use Unified Information Access to Get Most Value from Your Data

UIA platform should support textual analytics

The UIA platform you select should support a full array of textual analytics on the ever-expanding corpus of information that makes up the communication landscape of a typical enterprise. These include the following three:

1. Entity extraction: Locating names, places, dates and other words and phrases in text.

2. Sentiment analysis: Extracting and measuring opinions expressed in a document and on specific entities in a document. Entity-level sentiment analysis can show that an opinion is positive overall and includes specific negatives (for example, the writer loves a cell phone but complains about battery life).

3. Key phrases: Detecting significance of an entity based on statistical improbability.

Implemented strategically, UIA can affect an almost immediate increase in the business value of the organization's investment in information assets. UIA enables organizations to increase revenue by identifying new opportunities and outsmarting competitors, while retaining and nurturing customers by improving every interaction. These benefits can be achieved while reducing cost, which lowers risk by heading off issues early and streamlining infrastructure.

Avoiding problems, detecting opportunity and bolstering customer satisfaction are all critical to success. One of the most effective ways to make substantial improvements in these areas is to take advantage of UIA's ability to deliver insight. However, a lack of technology is not the sole issue, as technology can only go so far.

Ultimately, to improve the ability to connect the dots, all levels of an organization need to commit to the goal of breaking down the silos that impede effective collection and analysis of data. This is typically not a single-step endeavor, and companies should plan for the measures and methods that support continuous assessment and improvement. The results are well worth the effort.

Sarah Meyer is Director of Product Marketing at Attivio. Sarah has over 20 years of experience in bringing business-centric enterprise applications, middleware and solutions to market at large and small companies. Her focus has been collaboration and process improvement for business and IT. In the ten years she was at Lotus Development Corporation, she held positions in marketing, product management, product design, and development management. She can be reached at smeyer@attivio.com.