Follow Datanami:
February 19, 2016

Discover Actionable Insights from Unstructured Data

Derek Wang

We’ve all heard about the quantity of unstructured data – over 80% of business-relevant information exists in an unstructured format (primarily text). Many companies are looking for tools to derive actionable insights and value from this rapidly growing volume of data, but perceived complexities (cost, expertise, learning curve, time) dissuade them from doing so. However, the advent of visual text analytics platforms has changed the paradigm and made gleaning insight from text easier than ever.  Visual text analytics platforms empower everybody to augment decision making processes from data driven foundations and should be an essential component of any comprehensive business intelligence program.

Visualizing structured data has become best practice in many organizations, but companies are still overwhelmed by the massive volume and rapid growth of textual data sources. As a result much of this data and the insight that it contains remains untapped. Here are four reasons why textual analysis of these data sources is a fundamental necessity to achieving competitive advantage.

Your Company Has a Lot of Unstructured Text Data At Its Disposal

Textual data is being created everywhere. It can be found inside your company walls in the form of email, chat, surveys that you collect, comments to your website, comments from your CRM system, or text fields from any proprietary applications that you use. It can also be found outside your walls in social media, forums that you monitor, and comments from news articles that mention topics of interest to you.

There’s Value in Visualizing These Data Sets

How can you know what a book is about if you only read 20% of it? Sounds preposterous, but that’s exactly what’s happening in the corporate world today. Companies are spending billions of dollars analyzing structured data, while leaving unstructured data untouched. There’s a treasure trove of useful information in unstructured data and analyzing it with a data visualization tool will help companies quickly identify themes, trends, and emerging issues.

It Doesn’t Require a Team of Data Scientists

Analyzing data does not require a highly technical army of mathematicians, data scientists and IT folks on staff. True analysis occurs at the end user level – the brand manager in charge of a particular product segment, the marketer tasked with optimizing a campaign, or the executive looking to anticipate the wants and needs of a customer base. The end user has the ability, authority and motivation to improve business practices, and a visual text analytics tool can help them quickly identify the most relevant issues and take timely actions – without the need for a data scientist on hand.

End Users Are Empowered

Proper analysis requires a combination of machine computation and human interpretation. The machine does the number crunching, while end users apply their business acumen to determine best courses of action given the fact set. An end user must determine which data sets are valuable, how they should be mined and how their learnings can be applied to better your business. Moreover, a company’s job is to empower end users to have as much relevant data as possible to make the best decision possible as the engagement with this data leads to insight.

It is clear that unstructured data analysis can be used to create new competitive advantages.  New cutting edge visualization tools make interpretation easy for the end user, allowing them to clearly identify insights in just a few clicks. Mining insights from unstructured data sources has never been easier.Derek headshot

About the author: Derek Wang, Ph.D. is the founder and CEO of TasteAnalytics, a technology company that uncovers hidden signals in massive unstructured text data that drive business results and optimized business practices. Taste’s visual analytics platform extracts the most critical and nuanced factors for a brand and distills them into an exploratory visual dashboard for analytics and reporting.

Datanami