Unstructured, untapped, & undervalued data

If you care to Google “unstructured content” you’ll find remarkably few companies trying to sell you a solution to the problem of data that doesn’t integrate comfortably with the rest of the corporate technology stack. Now that might be because you should really type in “data mining” or “tagging” or “content management” etc. But it could also be due to the fact that we still have a major issue here.

According to a new IDC report I’ve just been sent a summary of, two-thirds of senior IT decision makers in Western Europe claim to have unstructured data adequately managed, or are making significant inroads to do so (43 per cent). Yet this is countered by the fact that when it comes to making decisions, 60 per cent of enterprises polled admit to either having too much information, or the information they need to make decisions is buried in irrelevant data.

I won’t bore you with a whole raft of the survey’s other figures, but personally I’m surprised to read that 63 per cent of European enterprises consider email as the primary source for managing unstructured content. Managing it you say? I would have said that it’s the primary source for creating it! Of course, email is the source of information to which people are most likely to turn when making decisions. So maybe the problem is inherently endemic.

Flexible web 2.0 type tools are sometimes heralded as an unstructured data panacea to bring more data management into dynamic environments. But I’d say it’s still early days for web 2.0 and I’d be pretty nervous about committing to a big investment in this area if I was a corporate CTO.