As the pace of information creation continues to accelerate leading to the phenomenon of Big Data, ECM provides a solution for managing and exploiting massive amounts of data, content and information.
Unstructured content is generally people-generated, people-oriented and does not fit into traditional database structures. Within the enterprise unstructured content takes the form of business documents such as reports, presentations, spreadsheets, email and web content etc. ECM provides well proven tools and platforms to support them by focusing on management and retention of these unique types of content.
However, for deriving benefits that are hidden in massive amounts of enterprise data and for developing the ability to derive more out of the big data we need to focus on our ability to analyze and explore, rather than just retain and manage unstructured data. We now know that the largest source of potential insight remains largely untapped in the form of Unstructured content, which represents as much as eighty percent of an organizations total information assets. The value of course comes from unstructured data, wrapped around structured data to provide a context for business actions and decisions.
Moreover, enterprise owned and operated information is only one part of the Big Data equation. The potential for insight and intelligence expands phenomenally when enterprise information is combined with public information. Content from the social stream such as Blogs, tweets etc. when combined with analysis of comments & ratings are a huge source of actionable insights for most organizations. Thus we find that under the ECM umbrella, Big Data, Search and Semantics are converging to open up new possibilities of actionable insights, from our ever growing content repositories.
