Panning for data gold - a guide to information management

Five information management technologies to look out for

Master data management
Master data management (MDM) consists of the strategies, processes, technologies and people needed to create and maintain a single, inclusive view of all the organisational data that should make up a customer record. MDM removes some of the difficulties associated with data quality, consistent classification and identification of data as well as data-reconciliation issues by providing complete, real-time views of data assets gathered from multiple applications, systems and databases.

Text mining
Text mining is the process of deriving high-quality information from text sources, drawing on information retrieval, data mining, machine learning, statistics and computational linguistics. An automated text mining system can analyse large collections of documents, email and other text sources to discover previously unknown information, relationships or patterns. With more than 80 per cent of information currently stored as text, text mining could have a high commercial value especially with its ability to mine information across different languages.

Data visualisation dashboards
An enterprise dashboard offering an at-a-glance visual display of selected corporate data gathered from across the organisation’s multiple data sources. With new tools to discover, interrogate and analyse business information, an easy-to-use display tool will be needed to allow the data to be viewed, shared and published. Data visualisation dashboard tools will be appearing as part of information management suites and as standalone applications.

New search technologies
Search engines will be entering a new era as vendors look for search algorithms that will uncover and present relationships in the disparate types of structured and unstructured data that exists across an enterprise. These new technologies will move search techniques forward from keyword recognition into fuzzy techniques that imitate the pattern-searching features of the human brain, allowing for inexact definition searches and incomplete search criteria.

Enterprise mashups
This is the trendy terminology for combining information from a variety of sources into a single view for the user. One of the most important aspects of a mashup is that the pieces of information are not displayed in isolation beside each other, but are overlaid and combined into contextual links to help the user make more informed decisions. For example, sales information could be overlaid on a map, and drilling down into the information could show customer records, sales forecasts or stock availability together with free-text customer information all at the click of a button.

Five firms looking to change the way you use information

Visokio
Omniscope from Visokio is a general-purpose data visualisation, reporting and publishing tool that allows users to bring together a variety of data from disparate sources. It lets users query, analyse and explore the data, and can cope with large table of data imported from spreadsheets or databases, together with related images and geographical information.
www.visokio.com

Endeca
Endeca provides users with tools to answer open-ended questions that technologies such as business intelligence, relational databases and search engines fail to answer. Powered by a new class of access-optimised database – the MDEX Engine – Endeca claims to help non-technical people find, analyse and understand complex information in ways that were never before possible.
www. endeca.co m

InforSense
InforSense produces a next-generation business intelligence platform, which it claims delivers mashup technology that can be used to access most of the data that exists inside or outside an organisation. The platform uses predictive and visual analytics to present data in a variety of ways, such as reports or embedded into existing applications and delivered over the web.
www.inforsense.com

Initiate Systems
Initiate produces master data management software that provides a complete, accurate and real-time view of data spread across multiple sources. It claims to improve data integrity, costs, and audit and security controls by accurately identifying duplicate and fragmented records. Having a single view of a customer can also improve customer service, reduce fraud and improve customer loyalty while cutting marketing costs.
www.initiatesystems.com

Clarabridge
Clarabridge’s text analytics software gathers all textual information from a company’s internal and external sources and restructures this data to provide additional customer intelligence. The tools are used to analyse customer feedback, aiming to improve overall operational performance and identify ways to improve customer loyalty.
www.clarabridge.com

In the second part of our guide to information management next week, we talk to IT leaders putting best practice into action.