1.       A tourist calls up a car-rental company to rent a car. The agent makes use of business application that combines historical transaction data and images to process the request.
2.       Security organizations target potential areas of crime by integrating information available from various sources – video, text, images and stored structured data.
In recent times, theres an explosion of information from existing and new sources that available in various forms. More and more companies and organizations leveraging web are moving away from the sales type objective and into the engage the customer type whereby the site is defined by the users requirements and interactions as opposed to the companies need to sell products or services.  Information available in structured data format (e.g. data generated from business applications) has evolved and matured in terms of providing business value to enterprises. In the recent past, there is a growing interest to tap the potential of information available in unstructured format (e.g. social media in the form of text, video etc.) and look for patterns to drive and enhance business value. Businesses acknowledge that unstructured information (content) from external sources like social networks, mobile devices, dealers and consumers contain valuable information nuggets hidden in them that could aid in making more informed & intelligent business decisions.
In both the cases mentioned above, analysis of multiple forms of content and structured data has to be done to arrive at a right business decision. Currently, full blown text analytics is the most advanced form of content analysis. Solution to develop technology to extend it to other forms of content – speech, images and video is still underway.
While technology providers recognize the opportunity to combine structured data and content information, augmenting the current technology products may not be viable option and this will drive the need to re-look at the solution. This business need to combine the data available in multiple forms – content data and processed structured data and analyse it to make correct business decisions is likely to propel the generation of a new solution that is possibly a – one where real time insights and real time systems work in tandem to enable informed decision making, something thats multi domain & multi-vendor analytics solution!
Kanchan is a former Happiest Mind and this content was created and published during her tenure.
