04.24.08
Structuring Unstructured Data to Support Business Intelligence
Here’s a good article by Michael Overturf of Pitney Bowes that the challenges we face with the tons of unstructured data (emails, etc.) in most systems and the opportunities that business intelligence can provide once the data is normalized. Most of our engagements entail a large degree of data normalization, in fact our tagline originally was “we make sense of your data.”
The foundation of any successful business intelligence (BI) project rests on accurate, clean data. In fact, data quality tools should be a precursor to any BI exercise. The challenges that companies continue to face regarding data quality are mostly around free-form or unstructured data. Unstructured data - from such sources as forms, email or documents -contains a great deal of information that can be usefully employed in a BI system, but first it must be accurately captured and cleansed.
The rest of the article can be found here.