IBM and Content Analytics

Solution Technology Trends

By: Steve Robins

From time to time, I comment on interesting technology trends.  As a solution marketer, these are useful trends to watch.  One such trend is content analytics. 

Over the years, much of the promise of enterprise content management or ECM, has been focused on the sharing of unstructured “content” (documents, images, web pages, video files – anything that doesn’t fit neatly into rows and tables) across the enterprise.  The goal: improved productivity, fewer information silos – and greater insight across the enterprise.  Problem was, even if everyone could see all of that information, they couldn’t necessarily make sense of it all.  Yes, metadata and tags provided some clues – when they were used.  But many times, users just don’t bother to tag content properly, so the whole system, well, falls apart.

So managers have a veritable treasure-trove of unstructured content sitting on their servers – but what does it mean to the business?  What’s actually happening in the business?  What’s buried in all of that data?

The answer lies in content analytics, the next major thrust for ECM solutions.  Just today IBM announced content analytics solutions that promise to help organizations make sense of all this information.  According to IBM’s press release, the new IBM Cognos Content Analytics offering:

“allows organizations to discover, refine and deliver new insights by analyzing unstructured enterprise content alongside structured data. Through focused navigation, users can identify trends and patterns and proactively detect anomalies for improved decision making.”

Expect to see more announcements in this area from other vendors.

*P.S.  Just for fun, search for the term “IBM Cognos Content Analytics” on IBM.com.  As of today, all you’ll find is the press release (isn’t that enough?).  Product web page?  Collateral?  Demo (gasp!). Nope – not there.  I can’t help but wonder if there’s a content analytics opportunity here…