What is Content Intelligence?
All organizations have it. It’s the human intelligence found in every organization, every impression, perception, experience, decision and reasoning process of the people around you. It’s found in e-mails, contracts, technical documents, meeting notes, blog posts, proposals, project plans, online chats, customer support records and more. It’s stored in content management systems, on file shares and personal hard drives and in your applications.
Approximately 80% of the information available in an enterprise is dispersed throughout the organization and the volume is growing at a rate of 50% to 60% each year. No matter how powerful, computers aren’t capable of deriving meaningful information from unstructured data. And the diversity, volume and velocity at which it’s flowing into businesses make it difficult for individuals to manage…so they don’t. As a result, the vast majority of human intelligence isn’t used in decision-making process. Applying content intelligence is the solution to this problem.
Content intelligence is the combination of semantic technology and information science that allow machines to model, interpret, describe, analyze and visualize the content of an enterprise in order to leverage the human intelligence within that content. It begins with a model that defines what’s important to the business; the entities, resources, concepts and the relationships between them. The model is interpreted by extracting the vocabulary and relationships so the content can be put in the context of the business. The vocabulary and relationships are used to classify and tag the content across multiple dimensions of interest. Automated analysis follows, extracting relevant facts, relationships and entities from the content using natural language processing methods to visualize the results; displaying the relationships between different components of content in the corpus.
There are many reasons to manage content intelligence such as:
Operational. There’s an organizational cost to not having access to human intelligence. Imagine an oil company sending an engineer to repair a malfunctioning oil well. The engineer doesn’t have access to the most recent schematics and as a result doesn’t provision the parts and tools he needs. He’s wasted time and money traveling to the job site and the well still needs repair.
Regulatory. The increasing regulatory pressures on organizations today can result in increased costs and risk when content intelligence is not available. Drug companies must report to regulators all observed side effects for drugs that are available for as long as the drug is sold. Without content intelligence they may not find a way to extract this information from doctors, nurses and health care practitioners notes, leaving them open to sanctions.
Customer. Finding new customers, retaining existing customers and maximizing revenue per customer are challenges faced by every organization. A large retailer increased online orders by 10% by analyzing customer comments from social media forums and on their website to drive product and category popularity scores. They used these scores with their search engine to ensure that customers found products they would be interested in buying.
New business. A California startup created a new business by analyzing 1 million wine conversations each day from approximately 13.5 million wine enthusiasts to connect them to wineries that produced wines they might like.
Productivity. A recent survey reported that knowledge workers spend, on average, 38 minutes searching for each document they need. IDC estimates that the productivity of the average knowledge worker is reduced by 21% because they spend too much time searching for information, which means for every 1,000 employees, an organization would need to hire an additional 210 employees to compensate for lost time.
Rework. It’s bad enough that people can’t find the information they need. When a critical document or piece of information is missing and needs to be recreated the organization loses time and money. And often the results are not the same, which leads to inconsistencies in the way business is conducted.
Despite the obvious benefits, most organizations struggle to extract the human intelligence in content. While many organizations invest in content management solutions, the ability to expose and use the human intelligence buried in the content is compromised. In isolation, content management systems are inadequate as they provide a single organizing construct of folders and file cabinets that mimic the paper constructs that preceded them. Enterprise search adds a needed, but insufficient, capability where words are indexed and retrieval is based on the appearance of specific words in a document. While a start, search engines lack an understanding of the context in which a word or phrase is used as well as the relationships between concepts. This lack of context means that the human intelligence is poorly communicated, or worse, wrongly communicated.
Content intelligence is the starting point for an explosion of innovation in the information space. An examination of history says that in the beginning, there was paper and business was manual. In the 1970s, transactions lived in hierarchical data structures and businesses became automated. In the 1980s, data was organized into relational databases, which were self-describing, in the sense that you could query the database to understand its structure. Self-description is the fundamental property that ensured that data could be used by multiple programs/systems and interactivity with the end user could be supported. That one change—the ability of the data to self-describe—led to an explosion of innovation in the structured data space. Data warehouses, data marts, business intelligence platforms and even big data analytics are all innovations that evolved from that one significant change.
Semaphore, Smartlogic’s content intelligence platform, provides the same self-describing capability to content. This is a profound development for content-based information as it can now be automated, analyzed and unified. Semaphore works with existing content management systems, workflow and search engines, so that the enterprise’s investment in technologies can deliver the value required without massive “rip and replace” programs. Thirty years after the self-describing revolution in structured data, content can self-describe in a way that allows for true innovation and exploitation. Content becomes Intelligent. Visit: www.smartlogic.com