Increasing volumes of information in the form of unstructured data and how to manage it continue to be well documented here in this community and on other external sites covering IT. The primary emphasis in this coverage is that unstructured data can only continue to grow, and organizations of all sizes must address the management challenges this growth creates through systematically aggregating, filtering and analyzing this information to help enhance decision-making capabilities.

Organizations looking to take advantage of their information stores can gain valuable insight into that data by deploying content management and business process management (BPM) applications. IBM Content Analytics (formerly Cognos Content Analytics) is one stand-alone platform that uses text analysis capabilities to facilitate analytics-based decision making. Organizations can leverage the analytics to achieve a number of benefits, including assessing content to determine what information should and should not be retained, leveraging advanced modeling tools to help customize approaches to content analysis, identifying trends and patterns that can enhance case management and more.

One resource that members of this community may find valuable is the Worldwide IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) community. It provides comprehensive information to its members that focuses on the capture, management and analysis of unstructured information. Though the community is enterprise focused, much of the information available through this resource can be applicable to midsize organizations.

The video highlighted here, which is from the IBM ECM site, offers a comprehensive overview of the need that increasing numbers of organizations are facing to manage and analyze diverse content from their silos of unstructured data. It also presents the IBM Content Analytics software as an approach that organizations can use to assess and manage the information they should retain, and then apply analytics to derive a clear, accurate rendering of their data. Organizations can use this analysis to make decisions that can enhance efficiency and reduce costs.

The announcement in October 2010 of an IBM and Hertz Corporation collaboration that included IBM business partner Mindshare Technologies highlights a content management system that serves as a good example. This system helped enhance customer service for car rental customers through analysis of vast amounts of customer feedback. Mindshare Technologies provides feedback monitoring systems, and the feedback information—collected in Web-based surveys, e-mails and text messages—was used to generate real-time reports for synthesizing and analyzing the input from customers to help make key decisions and enhance processes. The press release site provides a video that encapsulates some of the creative changes Hertz implemented as a result of the customer feedback analysis.

Unstructured data is likely to continue taxing the data stores of organizations in a wide array of industries, and other creative solutions leveraging content analytics through collaboration with IBM business partners may emerge to help them meet their challenges.

About Mindshare Technologies
Mindshare drives operational improvement. Using Mindshare, companies improve operational excellence, foster consumer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and support employee retention. Our industry experts guide clients in building comprehensive enterprise feedback management (EFM) solutions. Mindshare's proprietary survey technology captures the voice of the customer in real-time and immediately transforms it into actionable intelligence through powerful and incisive reporting. Mindshare serves more than 25 different industries including travel, hospitality, restaurant, financial, salon, automotive, and retail. For information, visit www.mshare.net.