Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

WHY UNSTRUCTURED DATA IS THE NEXT ANALYTICAL FRONTIER

The evolution of modern unstructured data analytics has been 54 years in the making. In 1958, IBM engineer H. P Luhn wrote an article saying that business intelligence is the analysis of structured and unstructured text documents. In that article, he defined business intelligence as a system that will

utilize data-processing machines for auto-abstracting and auto-encoding of documents and for creating interest profiles for each of the “action points” in an organization. Both incoming and internally generated documents are automatically abstracted, characterized by a word pattern, and sent automatically to appropriate action points.5

We can even go further back in time, with the first representation of data in rows and columns in the second century in Egypt. However, with today’s fast evolution and revolution of technology, software, and data mining, business intelligence has rapidly evolved since 1958. Unstructured data mining has come to life with the evolution of technology and software. Past unresolved analytics problems are now being addressed, thanks to the sophistication of tools and software. Consider Apple’s voice recognition technology for the iPhone, Siri. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010 and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, ...