Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and Content Analytics

Recent years have shown a paradigm shift in the way organizations rely on information to
help make key business decisions. In the past, organizations relied on past performance
numbers and transactional data to define how it has performed over time and thereby
provide competitive insights. However, these organizations have soon realised that data
alone cannot be completely relied on for driving businesses. An amazing level of detailed
business intelligence can be found in an organizations unstructured content. In fact, about
80 % of enterprise-relevant information originates in unstructured data such as Emails,
Blogs, Surveys, Transaction documents etc. And thus the surge of interest in Content
Analytics!
Content Analytics- What is it?
Gartner defines Content Analytics as a family of technologies that processes digital content
and user behaviour in consuming and engaging with content, such as documents, news sites,
customer conversations (both audio and text), and social network discussions, to answer
specific questions.
In short, Content analytics can be defined as unlocking business value from an
organizations unstructured content. Content Analytics via semantic technological tools are
often used to help generate answers to important business questions. For Eg: an
organization can understand why there has been a sudden drop in sales of one of its
products or even predict the downturn by relying on Content Analytics. There is a huge
hidden potential in text or content which can be explored and leveraged to help enterprises
make strategic decisions. Although this has led to a surge of interest in Content Analytics,
the latest Hype Cycle for Analytics from Gartner indicates that it will take another few
years to reach the Plateau of Productivity in terms of steady state adoption. This indicates
that although enterprises realize the power of content analytics, they have had a tough time
adopting it for various reason. This is where organizations can rely on EIM technologies to
help firms adopt Content Analytics as part of their business strategy. EIM provides the base
platform to capture/mine, store, organize and manage information before it can be
analysed.
EIM and Content Analytics:
EIM solutions can be used to solve enterprise issues in managing both structured and
unstructured data and turn them into strategic assets. Often, extracting knowledge from
structured data is easy as they reside in a machine readable format. These data reside in
organizational databases in predefined categories or data models and hence they can be
mined to generate key insights. In the past, Business Intelligence tools have proved very
effective in such reporting and analysis of structured data. Unstructured data, on the other
hand, is an all-new ballgame! Enterprises are flooded with content such as paper

documents, emails, text, audio/video etc. EIM solutions can be used to convert such
unstructured content into machine-readable structured content and thereon use basic
business intelligence and analytical tools to leverage the information residing in them.
Text data is a classic example of unstructured data. For eg: a supplier invoice document or a
Customer feedback document are swarmed with text. Text processing technology can be
used to extract meaning out of key information residing in them, transform them into
structured data and then gather business insights by processing them.
Sentiment Analysis is another such powerful methodology to extract meaningful
information from documents and other unstructured content. Sometimes referred to as
opinion mining, sentiment analysis, analyses documents using Natural Language Processing
(NLP), statistics or any other machine learning methods. It then extracts information from
the sentences and texts contained within such documents. The extracted information is
then weighted for opinions or sentiments gathered along a positive-negative spectrum.
Life science Industry is one such industry which has garnered a lot of benefits from
sentiment analytics based decisions. OpenText, a leading provider of EIM solutions, have a
plethora of offerings in the Content Analytics space. OpenText Content Analytics is a
multilingual advanced search and analytics platform which uses Natural Language
Processing (NLP) software that allows the extraction of meaningful information from
unstructured content all the while reducing content-related costs.
Benefits from Content Analytics:
Create machine-readable content from unstructured data
Connect people and processes with the right content
Discover business drivers and gather key business insights
Support strategic decision making & provide competitive advantage.
Reduce business risk and improve operational efficiency
Unstructured Content has the potential the power to define smarter decisions. By unlocking
the true value of such content and by leveraging the business insights gathered,
organizations around the globe can harness its true business potential. Avaali is a leading
provider of Enterprise Information Management solutions and engages with enterprise
customers the world over to assess their unstructured content and put in place long term
EIM strategies and technologies; including appropriate content analytics solutions that can
help them take their businesses to the next level.