Enterprise information management systems that are aware of the needs of applications, and the requirements of the business process involved to which they are feeding data, are delivering good value and efficiency to users, says information management specialist company OpenText senior VP for enterprise sales Simon Harrison.

OpenText enables users to browse managed data objects by their relation to events, person, application, process or date, as well as other criteria. This enables more effective management of financial, technical, legal and administrative information, besides others, by enabling only relevant information to be extracted and analysed.

Using unstructured data is becoming increasingly important to enterprises, with embedded natural language information within documents and metadata related to structured data providing deeper insight and visibility for the organisation.

Developing a way to seamlessly integrate unstructured data, gathered from existing records, and structured data from across an organisation is the focus of many South African companies currently, says OpenText Africa country sales director Lenore Kerrigan.

“Many South African companies have different information management technologies across various business units, which are mainly focused on structured data such as enterprise resource planning systems. The systems are often not enterprisewide and, thus, using structured and unstructured information from the whole business is not possible.”

About 80% of all data held by companies are unstructured, such as documents, emails, images and videos. The information contained in this unstructured information can provide businesses with significant new value and insight. The challenge is determining the relationships that unstructured data has to other pieces of data, and to enable analysis to make the unstructured data useful, says Harrison.

OpenText’s document management systems scan documents and other formats, such as emails, email attachments and social media feeds, and index the information based on keywords and dates, along with the information’s relationship to events, projects, people or business processes.

“Companies often try to integrate various information management and analytics systems, increasing complexity and increasing the time it takes to get meaningful insights. Instead, companies should use intelligent information management to process only information relevant to specific queries or business intelligence systems, such as information related to a project, business process or transaction,” he says.

OpenText’s solution is to place indexed data into a ‘data lake’, a virtual pool of data that feeds companies’ business processes, business information and analytics systems. These data lakes contain structured and indexed unstructured data, which remove the need to send all information through various analytics systems, and also mean that only relevant information is used for specific queries.

The system also analyses where data are stored across the network, the servers on which they are stored and the file structures in which they are stored. OpenText is developing improved capabilities to analyse data across an organisation’s network, including its cloud resources, improving the efficiency and speed of analytics systems.