I once had a boss who said “We don’t know what we don’t know.” At the time I thought it was an odd statement but over the years I’ve come to see exactly what he meant and to understand just how important “knowing” is to an organization.
It’s no surprise to any of us that today’s organizations are struggling to manage large and complex sets of data flowing into their organization at a rate they simply can’t manage with traditional technology. While they generally have a mechanism to capture and manage their structured information they’re struggling to manage the growing volumes of unstructured information. This valuable information is in disparate formats, stored in separate silos and requires additional processing before it can be used for decision-making.
They could ignore the unstructured information as they have done for decades, but they’ve come to understand that there are consequences; critical business decisions made with partial information can negatively impact the enterprise.
Utilizing Content Intelligence to transform an organization’s unstructured information into intelligent information can reduce organizational and reputational risk, decrease expenses, reduce storage and management costs and improve search and retrieval of relevant content.
The risks and costs of not utilizing Content Intelligence
Not understanding the content and context of your information can expose you a number of risks; from discovery risk, to non-compliance risk, the risk of wasted time and effort by staff who need information as well as the risk of managing and storing the information – all these risks can have financial impact. For example,
- What if an energy company had a file share which contained unclassified and unstructured content that everyone in the organization had access to? And what if while reviewing information, it was discovered that records associated with its wind farm or nuclear power plant facility were intermingled with someone’s secret truffle recipe. This is a serious compliance violation which could result in fines, sanctions or even a facility shutdown.
- Imagine a governmental agency trying to bring stability to an area and forge a positive relationship with the local population - they need information about economic conditions, sociological factors and terrain and they need it quickly; delays can result in negative outcomes.
- When knowledge workers are forced to access multiple systems on a regular basis to perform research to do their job, the wasted time and effort to the organization can be costly. And the daily frustration can result in employee turnover which incurs costs in recruitment, training and employee management.
When an organization is able to effectively respond to governmental mandates and legal requests, the possibility of sanctions and shutdowns decrease and the organization’s reputation remains intact.
What are the benefits of implementing a Content Intelligence strategy like Semaphore?
Knowing what the content is about, and where it came from drives information governance best practices to determine whether information should be maintained or destroyed. Maintaining content beyond its life-cycle results in increased costs in storage and maintenance which directly affect ROI.
The ability to reliably and quickly retrieve relevant information will allow knowledge workers to be efficient, effective and satisfied; reducing costs associated with wasted time, effort and rework and minimize human resource efforts and costs.
A robust semantic platform like Smartlogic’s Semaphore that combines the right technology and Content Intelligence practices can help organizations solve complex problems that traditional technologies cannot.
How can a semantic platform help?
Semantic technologies extract meaning from the unstructured information within the enterprise and make it available for automated processing:
Using Smartlogic’s Semaphore, content intensive processes can be handled by machines instead of humans. The identified facts and relationships can be used in business intelligence applications, to provide prescriptive and predictive analytics that drive business decisions.
Organizations using the principals of content intelligence and semantic technology to gain access to their unstructured information, identify redundant information, maintain reputation, reduce risk, and improve search and retrieval. Smartlogic works with organizations around the world to help them “know what they don’t know”.
- Semaphore Ontology Editor allows you to create a semantic model of the concepts, topics, products, market segments and other unique characteristics associated with your problem domain.
- Semaphore Classification Server uses the model to drive auto-classification, which employs natural language processing and entity and fact extraction processes to result in complete, precise and consistent metadata tags associated with each unstructured asset.
- Semaphore is compatible with graph technologies (RDF triples) that link information to drive machine based inference and visualization.
Content Intelligence and semantics equal savings
