The New Business Intelligence

An Interview with Peter J. Auditore, Vice-President, U.S. Marketing, Hummingbird USA

The worlds of structured and unstructured data are becoming increasingly difficult to parse. Business Intelligence, once the domain of the data warehouse/data mart keepers, has evolved to embrace all forms of information regardless of its "form," structure or lack of it.

In fact, it seems self-evident that the 80% of the world's information residing outside of databases would hold the lion's share of important customer, process and competitive value. And as we speak, the volume is increasing and the gap between structured and unstructured data is growing.

Yet, despite the pressure, it is only recently that enterprises are finally seeking ways to truly understand and then leverage what they have in their document and content repositories. Over the course of a few days in early November, we corresponded with Peter Auditore, the well-traveled Worldwide VP of Marketing for Hummingbird, about this disconnect, and the growing interest in this "New Business Intelligence." —Andy Moore

Moore: The term "Business Intelligence"—once pretty clearly associated with the analytics and interpretation of hard data from data warehouses—is being redefined. How does Hummingbird define business intelligence these days?

Auditore: Today, the world of unstructured data is fraught with chaos, confusion, redundancy and sloth-like business processes that are completely and totally dependent on human distribution of various types of paper documents, forms, contracts, policies, procedures and records. Adding to this chaos is an ever-growing mountain of emails and their attachments—now considered legal business records. Organizations worldwide are also challenged with the management of many new object types including audio files, video files, diagrams, illustrations, etc.

Many companies and government agencies are realizing the importance of managing and leveraging disparate unstructured information sources throughout their organizations, and this has given new life to the knowledge management industry.

Maintaining organizational competitiveness is the primary driver in the next wave of "e-business." Organizations that don't have their unstructured house in order will be unable to compete in a knowledge-based economy that mandates empowerment of the workforce. In an effort to corral their ever-growing intranets, many companies have deployed enterprise information portals as the first step in this empowerment process. However, the majority of them are essentially portals to nowhere that present a never-ending labyrinth of URLs with limited access to the right information that could optimize a business process or stimulate innovation. These portals to nowhere lack the basic information management infrastructure, like a document management system, that delivers on the promise of information utopia and bring actionable information into the decision-making process.

At Hummingbird we are in the business of data warehousing the unstructured world. It's what we call the "new business intelligence." Over the past year, I have presented Hummingbird's concept of an enterprise information management system (EIMS) to more than 500 companies in North America. And during each presentation I ask how many companies have information management/document management systems that extend beyond their legal departments. The shocking reality is that less than 10% of these companies had their unstructured house in order; this significantly contrasts market research pundits who estimate that approximately 50% to 60% of organizations worldwide have enterprisewide information management systems.

So from a big-picture perspective there really is not much difference between a traditional data warehouse implementation and an enterprise content/document management system. Without a 360º view of all information related to your business partners and/or customers it is very difficult to implement a successful CRM project, for example. Perhaps this is why many CRM initiatives have failed; the difficulties in achieving an encompassing view of the customer which bridges the gap between structured and unstructured data.

Several years ago, Intuit began a CRM initiative that didn't involve traditional data warehousing, as we know it, but focused on the creation of a web-based knowledge system that leveraged existing unstructured information sources about its customer base. The customer service center initiative was focused on increasing the effectiveness of customer service reps and their ability to handle calls.

Through its constant interaction with customers since the company's inception in 1983, Intuit had amassed a huge internal knowledge base about its own products, which it uses to find known solutions to problems customers may encounter. Intuit deployed a single, unified search engine from Hummingbird to support customer service centers and facilitate their goal of providing superior customer service.

"Our internal knowledge base is always searched first in an effort to find a known solution to a problem being reported by a customer," said Alice Adair, Manager of Systems Development for Intuit's System Support Department. "The success of the knowledge base searches directly affects our ability to provide superior service to our customers, and reduces costs associated with handling support calls."

The good news is a massive worldwide transformation of unstructured data sources has begun. The very concept of "unstructured" may well be a thing of the past, since a paper document that has been scanned and digitized with metadata is no longer unstructured. Many from the BI data-warehousing world might argue that a document in digitized form has limited structure. But the reality is once a digitized document is in a DM system library with appropriate metadata, it can be easily accessed, archived, categorized/indexed, distributed and almost instantly retrieved. In fact if you look at any DM system deployment you'll find many similarities to a typical data warehouse or data mart. A DM system uses a server-based library component and, usually, a back-end RDBMS as a repository. Not so very different from a data warehouse...

What we're doing at Hummingbird is leveraging our BI tools in the world of DM and information management.

Moore: In your literature you talk about the transformation of information into intelligence. At what point does this transformation from one steady state to another occur? When the information is delivered to the human? When the human responds to it? When it's collaborated on ... ?

Auditore: In the most simplest and broadest sense, what we mean is that once information is transformed to a digital format (a document, record policy procedure, etc.), then it can be leveraged across the organization through an information management system to empower others. As we know, information exists in many forms in any organization and is most often classified in terms of tacit, explicit and structured information sources. The legal vertical market segment overall is light years ahead of the rest of the world and has long understood the value of intellectual assets. The key to this equation is getting the right or relevant information to empower the individual and organization as a whole, and then information becomes intelligence or actionable knowledge.

For example, law firms treat the Web as if it were a giant data warehouse, and it really is. Most data warehousing efforts, however, are focused internally, and normally only on RDBMS data that has be