Big Data faces big content across the chasm

LONDON, ENGLAND: One of the attributes of successful companies is their ability to understand their market, their customers, and their competitors. Analysing mounds of data is one of the better ways to gain insight into what makes a company tick and to uncover new opportunities.

Advanced content management, search, business intelligence and other "big data" technologies have armed companies with the ability to affordably analyse vast amounts of data. Given their potential to deliver massive value and competitive advantage, these technologies have not surprisingly seen tremendous growth and adoption over the past 18 months according to new research conducted by AIIM.

The new AIIM report, "Big Data and Content Analytics: measuring the ROI," is a follow-up to a similar report issued in April 2012 and highlights the growth of big data over the past 18 months and exposes key trends. It also provides recommendations for how companies can more efficiently realise the benefits of analysing big data.

The latest research indicates that while big data analysis is increasingly seen as an essential capability, 60 percent of organisations have only limited capability in business intelligence (BI) reporting, and 65 percent have a "somewhat disorganised" approach to content management.

This is not a good starting point for the complex world of big data analytics, warns AIIM, which fears that many organisations are finding that they have vast quantities of "dark data" (data that lacks any control or classification) that could be holding valuable business intelligence.

"Big data potentially holds huge insight for organisations, but the mass of "dark data" could impact the ability to extract that insight effectively," said Doug Miles, director, Market Intelligence at AIIM.

"Businesses should look to harness their information, and combine it across disparate systems as a precursor to their big data journey. Connecting structured transactional datasets to unstructured data or text-based content is a key way to unlock knowledge, but most are finding this to be a major challenge."