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Organisations are generating more information than ever, but the sheer data volume is not their biggest problem in the era of Big Data. The fact that more value is not being extracted from unstructured information because it is not organised, categorised or generally searchable is what hampers most enterprises trying to leveraging enterprise knowledge.

Based on our research, 85 per cent of the senior information management professionals in North America and Europe say their organisations are creating more unstructured data than ever, but only 34 per cent see this as an acute problem. The major obstacle they face, 71 per cent of the respondents say, is that the content they need is scattered among different business units and stored in different formats, while over half note that this information is not labelled with the metadata necessary to make it searchable.

This poor state of information access and organisation is hurting businesses trying to fuel collaborations, inform new projects, provide material for proposals, avoid repetition of research, repurpose work and generally streamline the flow of enterprise. Unstructured information such as customer correspondence, market intelligence, internal communications, product details, technical specifications, R&D reports, field and case notes, service histories and other key documents are simply not available to the vast majority of organisations.

If this largely unsearchable data were to be put to good use, companies would not only eliminate the duplication of work and make a huge amount of untapped knowledge and experience available, but they would gain advantage against other organisations in their field. In fact, 89 per cent of those surveyed believe that in order to gain a competitive advantage it is crucial that they are able to search and use their organisations unstructured information.

Organisations seeking to harness the power of Big Data need to tap into Big Content - the unstructured element of Big Data. To achieve this, these organisations need Content Intelligence. This involves implementing applications and utilising tools that radically improve an enterprise's ability to exploit unstructured information.

To attain the access to information and insights that Content Intelligence provides, organisations need systems that enable them to automatically and accurately categorise and meta-tag their unstructured data. What's more, given the fragmentation and dispersal of content, these systems need to be able to classify and label data in its original locations and in different forms. Moving and reformatting huge volumes of disparate information could be extremely costly, even impossible.

Existing enterprise information management and storage applications and related tools, including Microsoft SharePoint, MS FAST, Apache Lucene/Solr and Google Search Appliance, don't provide native Content intelligence. This means organisations struggle to unearth the commercial value in unstructured information that could be of benefit.

The native search facilities in such systems are not designed to achieve the level of Content Intelligence organisations require. These systems possess basic classification and taxonomy management capabilities which often cannot be used to apply consistent and updated metadata across diverse and disparate information sources. They also lack the sort of specialised search functions that enable users to pinpoint very specific data.

All is not lost as there are some bolt-on applications that can add Content Intelligence, thus enabling much better management of ontologies/taxonomies, automatic classification of all enterprise information and other capabilities that make information quicker and easier to retrieve. Such tools enable broader enterprise information platforms to addresses searchers' intent so that extraneous documents can be filtered out during the search process and relevant content that could otherwise fall outside the search parameters is included. Using this approach, assets can be accessed and used to add value to an organisation.