The information technology Old World consists of fielded records in structured databases — transactions, profiles, log files, and reference data. The New World is everything else, including online media and massive volumes of social postings and other forms of “user generated content.” We want it all: The business insights and predictive power to be gained by analyzing and mining Old World data, augmented by quantitative and qualitative data newly discoverable in formerly inaccessible New World sources. It’s text and content analytics — technologies that extract the information content of textual and other “unstructured” sources — coupled with network-analysis methods, that extend BI into new domains. Techniques include sentiment and influencer analysis, behavioral models, and psychometric profiling as well as more conventional “textual ETL.” The net result is progress toward universal information access, a new BI. Seth’s talk will introduce the “unstructured information” challenge, the business and technical context and drivers that motivate us to collect and analyze online, social, and enterprise content as a complement to, and in conjunction with, our BI work. He will discuss text and content analytics technologies and how they mesh with larger social and enterprise analytics efforts. And he will provide guidance on moving your organization toward this vision of universal information access.

View the presentation, Text, Content, and Social Analytics: BI for the New World