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By Laton McCartney
Text analytics (TA) is a technology that's been around the block a few times, but recently it's being applied to everything from blogs to social networks.
With organizations today trying to get a handle on social media and the like, that's good news. Increasingly, providers of text analytics solutions are offering new and more advanced tools to analyze content in ways that can reveal patterns, sentiments and relationships in support of better and more timely business decisions. These tools can be applied to social media venues as well as other areas such as call centers, claims forms, surveys and sales returns.
Today, "text analytics users can access any public information sources including Web-based sources such as Twiitter and Facebook, blogs, online marketing measurements, even competitors' Web sites," Fiona McNeil, global analytics product marketing manager at SAS Institute, tells CIOZone.
"Because the amount of information within the enterprise -- already overwhelming -- continues to grow, neither software vendors nor their customers can afford to ignore the promise of text analytics," said IDC research VP Susan Feldman in a recent report. "Automated tools for handling this flood of information are the only solution to coping with the increasing demands for compliance, more targeted discovery and better business intelligence."
Maybe so, but TA still hasn't won widespread acceptance in the corporate mainstream. "Corporations have spent a lot on business intelligence and data mining tools," explains business analytics consultant Seth Grimes. "They still have a long way to go in using those tools effectively with their operational data. Consequently, they're not ready to deal with text data quite yet."
In addition, TA solutions are often brought in the back door of an enterprise by lines of business, especially marketing. CIOs, as a result, are often out of the loop -- but that's likely to change. "CIOs need to know what their users are doing," says Grimes, who argues that the information obtained by, say marketing, through TA has to be brought into the corporate database before it can be fully useful and successfully leveraged. "That means the CIO needs to take ownership."
"The progression of the technology usually starts with deployment by a line of business," says Jason Verlen, vice president of R&D and chief product strategist at IBM SPSS, which combines text and predictive analytics in its offerings. "Once these technologies show a measurable ROI, they become more institutionalized and more of a corporate asset." That's when the CIO needs to step in to incorporate the results of analytical research into the corporate database.
CIOs, then, need to be tracking the TA market and its use within the enterprise. Here are five reasons why.
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