Unstructured Data

Exactly 5 months 23 days back your client had sent you an estimate via mail. Today, suddenly they wake up in the search of the ‘important’ document and bombard you with mails and calls. But where is it?

After 20 minutes of searching through the folders and mails, with different keywords, you finally recover it from trash mail folder, send it and breathe easy.

Wait! Did we say 20 minutes? Think if each of your employees spends that amount of time to find one document, may be 10 such documents everyday and uncountable every month. Finding right data claims invaluable man-hours for your company. According to Gartner, white-collar workers will spend anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of their time in a year just managing documents, and finding right information from those.

We buy information, we sell information, and we store information. But stored information is different from organized information, and we all have misconception regarding this.
Recently, HP surveyed 1020 CIO’s and department heads of large enterprise organisations across the UK and Europe. It found that on average, European companies believe than only 25 percent of their data is curerently unstructured, i.e. unorganized. While, as per the analysts, around 70% of the current data is actually unstructured, not in a usable form.

Whenever we receive data, we put them in files, arrange those in the folders, and feel happy. But that data is useless when we search for an element from there, when the element is not just a keyword, but a phrase, a sentence. The data doesn’t help us in comparison or analysis. Even when computer finds matches, someone has to sit and generate meaning from it. We cannot ask the data a question and get an answer. We have to find the answer ourselves from the heaps of information.

Worldwide, 80% of company’s data is unstructured, and counting. Unstructured data lies in mails, PDFs, documents, images, presentations, voice mails and so on. The irony is, it’s all with us, but not in a searchable format. So says Mani Shrabang, “ We’re drwoning in information but are starving for knowledge… That information is only useful when it can be located and then synthesized into knowledge.”

Information search in company database is much more than Google type search. They need to analyze information as a whole, generate patterns in that. No software till date serves that purpose. And when we fail to generate information, company suffers huge loss.

Morgan Stanley paid the ransom of $1.4 billion last year in a legal battle. Some claim the judgment was a direct result of the defense's inability to produce relevant e-mails and documents the court demanded. As one analyst noted, "During the pretrial discovery process, and the trial itself, Morgan Stanley kept stumbling on old, hard-to-search backup tapes and couldn't perform effective searches on its newer e-mail archive." Eventually, the judge became so frustrated with the delay that she ruled against Morgan Stanley.

It’s estimated that a company with 10,000 employees can save a neat $ 2.5 million by improving search on its intranet. Then think how much of extra your company’s bearing right now cost. No doubt that we need a system to shape up the unstructured data, to extract information from them, to do an intelligent search. And we need it right away!