Actionable Intelligence and the New Reality of Data

Several readers of my recent post, “Reshaping the New Reality of Data” asked for additional insight, and how it could impact them.

So, what does this mean to you? It depends on your role and responsibility, but for those responsible for business operations like order and invoice processing, claims processing, or loan origination, the process begins with the capture of source documents and the classification and extraction of appropriate data. The data can be placed into an Enterprise Content Management system and integrated with Business Process Management to insure that complex internal processing is performed accurately and efficiently.

In the past, this process was driven through the use of standard forms, or structured data, where the location of the data, and the format was pre-determined. Today, according to Gartner, 80% of incoming information arrives in unstructured format in the form of WORD documents, PDF’s, texts, email, and even images. Leadership vendors utilize leading edge technologies to accurately identify, classify, and extract this information to drive your business.

Creating Actionable Intelligence from these “in flight” sources represents only one aspect of today’s data challenges. For IT and Compliance professionals, they need to control escalating storage and data management costs, AND reduce risks associated with the loss sensitive data. According to IDC up to 90% of the data in an organization is considered “dark data”. Per Gartner, dark data is defined as “information assets that organizations collect, process and store in the course of their regular business activity, but generally fail to use for other purposes.”

This data consumes physical storage and inflates the costs not only of the raw storage, but the cost to perform and maintain backups, driving up overall IT expenses at a time when businesses are working to do more with less. IDC estimates that upwards of 30% of dark data is ROT (redundant, obsolete or trivial) and could be defensibly deleted.

With all the dark data in organizations, CISO’s and Compliance professionals need to extract Actionable Intelligence from this data in order to protect from possible exposure. Identifying and protecting PII, PCI, and PHI is the most obvious, but internal proprietary information and other intellectual property could also easily be hidden in corporate dark data.

So, the answer to how it impacts you all depends, but it surely has an impact somewhere.

I would welcome your thoughts and feedback, and would like to hear about your own experiences with dealing with unstructured data and the growth of dark data.