BI and Analytics: A Power Couple

Computerworld - The marriage of business intelligence and text analytics is starting to have a profound impact on companies in several industries, including health care, insurance and finance, which are just waking up to the benefits of tying structured BI data to unstructured text.

Text analytics tools use linguistics, rules-based natural-language processing, specialized algorithms and other methods to impose order on unstructured text scattered throughout the enterprise. More IT executives are using text analytics software to mine disparate document- management applications, e-mail and phone systems, or even blogs and Web sites.

The goal is to breathe new life into static BI reports. By extracting facts, concepts and data relationships buried in text, text analytics software transforms this unstructured information into modeled data that can then be tied to BI databases. Hence, text analytics promises to enhance the context and meaning of BI data, which is often presented as canned reports scraped from data warehouses or major applications, such as ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) databases.

Though powerful, the combination of text analytics and BI isnt yet typical. Most people associate business intelligence with online analytical processing [OLAP], which focuses on structured data, as far as the process and user interface are concerned, says Boris Evelson, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

However, to become more effective, OLAP experiences need to bring unstructured data into the analysis in a seamless way that is transparent to the user, he says.

Indeed, despite spending bundles to build sophisticated BI databases, many corporate IT officials find that a lot of vital data stays locked up as text throughout the enterprise, notes David OConnell, an analyst at Nucleus Research Inc. in Wellesley, Mass.

Within this data is important competitive, marketing, sales campaign and CRM trend data. However, you can only find and track these trends by automating analysis and combining it with BI, says OConnell. By bolting text analytics onto traditional BI applications  a process that is not terribly expensive, since little data cleansing is necessary  the value of BI efforts is extended. Eventually, companies get new ROI on existing BI investments.

Order, Please
BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Inc. (BCBS) provides a good example of the benefits of extending BI through text analytics. BCBS has successfully linked the two technologies to hone analysis of the costs of insuring high-risk and low-risk members in four disease categories.

By combining related structured and unstructured data, we were able to deliver new business insight, enable new forms of analysis and present actionable information to users in the form of enhanced BI, says Frank Brooks, chief data architect and senior manager of data resources and management at the Chattanooga-based insurance provider.