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According to The Data Warehouse Institute, 80 percent of the information in
most enterprises is unstructured and thus unavailable from any standard database
management system. What are the implications of this statement? Eighty percent
of enterprise information -- including word processing documents, spreadsheets,
PDFs, and e-mail -- isn't available to analysts. Typically these people only
slice-and-dice information in structured databases, which represents the remaining
20 percent of information in the organization.
Enterprise search software appears to solve the problem by incorporating unstructured
documents into the same architecture as traditional reports. A simple search
box enables users to interact with a vast set of information that includes Word
documents, database-driven reports and tagged documents from document management
systems. It's simple, elegant and unified -- isn't it?
Unfortunately, it's not. Search engines typically deliver pages of unrelated
results. It would be nice if they were categorized according to some predetermined
criteria, like the pertinent people, the cost of the goods discussed, or any
other meaningful structure. Better still, it would be great if the results could
be merged into a report or dashboard to simplify analysis.
Here again, it's not that easy. Early adopters tell us that enterprise search
projects are difficult to manage and the results often disappoint. The recent
Global Intranet Strategies Survey revealed that 59 percent of those companies
with enterprise search solutions weren't happy with their current implementations.
In fact, 25 percent of them were looking for a new search vendor.
It's unlikely that these organizations will find a single solution that does
it all. One large company reported that they had deployed an industry-leading
search appliance, but found that it was unable to fulfill the needs of the entire
organization. Several departments implemented other solutions, leading to an
expensive dilemma: either migrate to a single solution or develop a common user
interface that aggregates results from all of them.
How BI can help
Many businesses have implemented Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems
and data warehouses. These are often huge projects that yield new types of knowledge
and insight. But can that knowledge be applied to enterprise search?
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