Supplementing Structured with Unstructured Information
Business intelligent solutions have often ignored unstructured information because it is much more difficult to access and associate with the related structured business data that exists within applications such as ERP , CRM ,SCM etc.
Unstructured information provides a valuable but underestimated information asset for most enterprises. Customer contracts, orders, spreadsheets , projects plan , scanned images all provide valuable insight to business operations. All this information is trapped within Content Management Systems or simply resides in shared network drives or PC workstations. What’s more important is that this information is isolated and not related to information that exists in structured data repositories.
For example, Customer financial data exists within a company’s ERP system while budget plans, orders, faxes etc related to specific customer are locally stored or scattered network or PC drives. It is important for enterprises to have a single view of a customer with all relevant information, structured and unstructured, regardless of the source or format of information.
By incorporating content into reports organizations can gain insight into all relevant information considering a business aspect. By utilizing this information through a portal-like interface users can gain a more complete picture of customers, products and business operations. Βy connecting related documents and other content with structured data business users have better insight to the context of their business operations which in result leads to better business decisions.
Document manager, an integrated component of the product suite, provides the tools needed so that content distributed across the enterprise can be seamlessly integrated into reporting and analytic applications. This is accomplished by utilizing metadata information to fully describe the context of documents residing on shared drives and PC stations. By ‘’tagging’’ documents with the appropriate metadata information organizations can give semantic meaning to these unstructured forms of information. This metadata information can be utilized to relate documents with structured information residing in Relational Systems or semi structured repositories ( such as xml files, flat files etc).Furthermore , metadata can be used to perform search operations through parameterized query’s on these documents as if they were residing in a Structured data repository.