Five vendors committed to content analytics for ECM

In 2007, Hurwitz & Associates fielded one of the first market studies on text analytics. At that time, text analytics was considered to be more of a natural extension to a business intelligence system than a content management system. However, in that study, we asked respondents who were planning to use the software, whether they were planning to deploy it in conjunction with their content management systems. It turns out that a majority of respondents (62%) intended to use text analytics software in this manner. Text analytics, of course, is the natural extension to content management and we have seen the market evolve to the point where several vendors have included text analytics as part of the their offerings to enrich content management solutions.

Over the next few months, I am going to do a deeper dive into solutions that are at the intersection of text analytics and content management; three from content management vendors EMC, IBM, and OpenText as well as solutions from text analytics vendor TEMIS and analytics vendor SAS. Each of these vendors is actively offering solutions that provide insight into content stored in enterprise content management systems. Many of the solutions described below also go beyond providing insight for content stored in enterprise content management systems to include insight over other content both internal and external to an organization. A number of solutions also integrate structured data with unstructured information.

• EMC: EMC refers to its content analytics capability as Content Intelligence Services (CIS). CIS supports entity extraction as well as categorization. It enables advanced search and discovery over a range of platforms including ECM systems such as EMC’s Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, and others.

• IBM: IBM offers a number of products with text analytics capabilities. Its goal is to provide rapid and deep insight into unstructured data. The IBM Content Analytics solution provides integration into IBM ECM (FileNet) solutions such as IBM Case Manager, its big data solutions (Netezza) and integration technologies (DataStage). It also integrates securely with other ECM solutions such as SharePoint, Livelink, Documentum and others.

• OpenText: OpenText acquired text analytics vendor Nstein in 2010 in order to invest in semantic technology and expand its semantic coverage. Nstein semantic services are now integrated with OpenText’s ECM suite. This includes automated content categorization and classification as well as enhanced search and navigation. The company will soon be releasing additional analytics capabilities to support content discovery. Content Analytics services can also be integrated into other ECM systems.

• SAS: SAS Institute provides a number of products for unstructured information access and discovery as part of its vision for the semantically integrated enterprise. These include SAS Enterprise Content Categorization, SAS Ontology Management (both for improving document relevance) and SAS Sentiment Analysis and SAS Text Miner for knowledge discovery. The products integrate with structured information; with Microsoft SharePoint, FAST ESP, Endeca, EMC Documentum; as well as with both Teradata and Greenplum.

• TEMIS: TEMIS recently released its Networked Content Manifesto, which describes its vision of a network of semantic links connecting documents to enable new forms of navigation and retrieval from a collection of documents. It uses text analytics techniques to extract semantic metadata from documents that can then link documents together. Content Management systems form one part of this linked ecosystem. TEMIS integrates into ECM systems including EMC Documentum and Centerstage, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and MarkLogic.

Four Findings from the Hurwitz & Associates Advanced Analytics Survey

Hurwitz & Associates conducted an online survey on advanced analytics in January 2011. Over 160 companies across a range of industries and company size participated in the survey. The goal of the survey was to understand how companies are using advanced analytics today and what their plans are for the future. Specific topics included:

- Motivation for advanced analytics
- Use cases for advanced analytics
- Kinds of users of advanced analytics
- Challenges with advanced analytics
- Benefits of the technology
- Experiences with BI and advanced analytics
- Plans for using advanced analytics

What is advanced analytics ?
Advanced analytics provides algorithms for complex analysis of either structured or unstructured data. It includes sophisticated statistical models, machine learning, neural networks, text analytics, and other advanced data mining techniques. Among its many use cases, it can be deployed to find patterns in data, prediction, optimization, forecasting, and for complex event processing. Examples include predicting churn, identifying fraud, market basket analysis, and analyzing social media for brand management. Advanced analytics does not include database query and reporting and OLAP cubes.

Many early adopters of this technology have used predictive analytics as part of their marketing efforts. However, the diversity of use cases for predictive analytics is growing. In addition to marketing related analytics for use in areas such as market basket analysis, promotional mix, consumer behavior analysis, brand loyalty, churn analysis, companies are using the technology in new and innovative ways. For example, there are newer industry use cases emerging including reliability assessment (i.e. predicting failure in machines), situational awareness, behavior (defense), investment analysis, fraud identification (insurance, finance), predicting disabilities from claims (insurance), and finding patterns in health related data (medical)

The two charts below illustrate several key findings from the survey on how companies use advanced analytics and who within the organization is using this technology.

• Figure 1 indicates that the top uses for advanced analytics include finding patterns in data and building predictive models.

• Figure 2 illustrates that users of advanced analytics in many organizations have expanded from statisticians and other highly technical staff to include business analysts and other business users. Many vendors anticipated this shift to business users and enhanced their offerings by adding new user interfaces, for example, which suggest or dictate what model should be used, given a certain set of data.

Other highlights include:

• Survey participants have seen a huge business benefit from advanced analytics. In fact, over 40% of the respondents who had implemented advanced analytics believed it had increased their company’s top-line revenue. Only 2% of respondents stated that advanced analytics provided little or no value to their company.
• Regardless of company size, the vast majority of respondents expected the number of users of advanced analytics in their companies to increase over the next six to 12 months. In fact, over 50% of respondents currently using the technology expected the number of users to increase over this time period.

The final report will be published in March 2011. Stay tuned!

Five basic questions to ask before leaping into low cost social media monitoring

I just finished testing two low cost (<$50.00/mo) social media monitoring tools. They were both easy to use with clean user interfaces. Both had some nice features, especially around reaching back out to people making comments in social media. However, running these two services side by side brought home some issues with these kinds of offerings – specifically in the area of coverage, sentiment analysis, and analytics. Note that I am not naming names because I believe the issues I ran into are not unique to these specific tools, but to the low cost social media monitoring market, in general. Some of these issues will also apply to higher priced offerings!

What I did:

I ran an analysis using the term “advanced analytics” including the term itself as well as companies (as additional topics) in the space. I made sure to be as specific and clear as I could be, since I knew topics were keyword based. I let the services run side by side for several weeks, interacting with the tools on a regular basis.

What I noticed:

1. Topic specification. Tools will vary in how the end user can input what he or she is looking for. Some will let you try to refine your keyword search (and these are keyword based, they won’t let you discover topics per se), other won’t. Some will only allow search across all languages, others will allow the user to specify the language. Find out how you can be sure that you are getting what you are searching for. For example, does the tool allow you be very specific about words that should and should not be included (i.e. SAS is the name of an analytics company and also an airline)? Since these low cost tools often don’t provide a way to build a thesaurus, you need to be careful.
2. Completeness of Coverage. The coverage varied tremendously between the services. Nor was the coverage the same for the same day for the same company name that I was tracking (and I was pretty specific, although see #1 above). In fact it seemed to vary by at least an order of magnitude. I even compared this manually in twitter streams. When I asked, I was told by one company that if they weren’t picking up everything, it must be a bug and it should be reported (!?). The other company told me all of my content came to me in one big fire hose, because there had been a problem with it, before (!?). In both cases, there still seemed to be a problem with the completeness of content. The amount of content just didn’t add up between the two services. In fact, one company told me that since I was on a trial, I wasn’t getting all of the content – yet even with the firehose effect, the numbers didn’t make sense. Oh. And don’t forget to ask if the service can pull in message boards, and which message boards (i.e. public vs. private). For an analysis, all of these content issues might mean that completeness of buzz might be misrepresented which can lead to problems.
3. Duplicate Handling. What about the amount of buzz? I thought that part of my content counting discrepancy might be due to how the company was dealing with duplicates. So beware. Some companies count duplicates (such as retweets) as buzz and some do not. However, be sure to ask when duplicate content is considered duplicate and when it is not. One company told me that retweets are not counted in buzz, but are included in the tag cloud (!?).
4. Sentiment analysis. The reality is that most of the low cost tools are not that good at analyzing sentiment. Even though the company will tell you they are 75% accurate the reality is more like 50%. Case in point: on one offering, one job listing was rated positive and another job posting listed as negative. In looking at the two postings, it wasn’t clear why (shouldn’t a job post be neutral anyway) Note, however, that many of these tools provide a means to change the sentiment from +/-/neutral (if they don’t then don’t buy it). So, if sentiment is a big deal to you then be prepared to wade through the content and change sentiment, if need be. Also ask how the company does sentiment analysis and find out at what level it does the analysis (article, sentence, phrase)
5. Analysis. Be prepared to ask a lot of questions about how the company is doing its analysis. For example, sometimes I could not map the total buzz to other analytics numbers (was it duplicates handling or something else). Additionally, some social media monitoring tools will break down buzz by gender. How is this determined? Some companies determine gender based on a name algorithm, while others use profile information from facebook or twitter (obviously not a complete view of buzz by gender, since not all information sources are twitter and facebook like). Additionally, some of the tools will only show a percentage (a no-no in this case), while others may show the number and the percent. Ditto with geolocation information. If the data is incomplete (and isn’t representative of the whole) then there could be a problem with using it for analytical purposes.

What this means

Certainly, the lure of low cost social media platforms is strong, especially for small and medium businesses. However, I would caution people to do their homework and ask the right questions, before purchasing even a low cost product. I would also suggest testing a few products (running them side by side for the same time period, even if you have to pay for it for a month or so) to compare the tools in terms of coverage, sentiment, and analysis.

The reality is that you can end up with an analysis that is completely wrong if you don’t ask the right questions of the service provider. The amount of buzz might not be what you think it is, how your company compares to another company might be wrong based on how you specified the company name, the sentiment might be entirely wrong if you don’t check it, and the analysis may be misleading unless you understand how it was put together.

Five Analytics Predictions for 2011

In 2011 analytics will take center stage as a key trend because companies are at a tipping point with the volume of data they have and their urgent need to do something about it. So, with 2010 now past and 2011 to look forward to, I wanted to take the opportunity to submit my predictions (no pun intended) regarding the analytics and advanced analytics market.

• Advanced Analytics gains more steam. Advanced Analytics was hot last year and will remain so in 2011. Growth will come from at least three different sources. First, advanced analytics will increase its footprint in large enterprises. A number of predictive and advanced analytics vendors tried to make their tools easier to use in 2009-2010. In 2011 expect new users in companies already deploying the technology to come on board. Second, more companies will begin to purchase the technology because they see it as a way to increase top line revenue while gaining deeper insights about their customers. Finally, small and mid sized companies will get into the act, looking for lower cost and user -friendly tools.
• Social Media Monitoring Shake Out. The social media monitoring and analysis market is one crowded and confused space, with close to 200 vendors competing across no cost, low cost, and enterprise-cost solution classes. Expect 2011 to be a year of folding and consolidation with at least a third of these companies tanking. Before this happens, expect new entrants to the market for low cost social media monitoring platforms and everyone screaming for attention.
• Discovery Rules. Text Analytics will become a main stream technology as more companies begin to finally understand the difference between simply searching information and actually discovering insight. Part of this will be due to the impact of social media monitoring services that utilize text analytics to discover, rather than simply search social media to find topics and patterns in unstructured data. However, innovative companies will continue to build text analytics solutions to do more than just analyze social media.
• Sentiment Analysis is Supplanted by other Measures. Building on prediction #3, by the end of 2011 sentiment analysis won’t be the be all and end all of social media monitoring. Yes, it is important, but the reality is that most low cost social media monitoring vendors don’t do it well. They may tell you that they get 75-80% accuracy, but it ain’t so. In fact, it is probably more like 30-40%. After many users have gotten burned by not questioning sentiment scores, they will begin to look for other meaningful measures.
• Data in the cloud continues to expand as well as BI SaaS. Expect there to still be a lot of discussion around data in the cloud. However, business analytics vendors will continue to launch SaaS BI solutions and companies will continue to buy the solutions, especially small and mid sized companies that find the SaaS model a good alternative to some pricey enterprise solutions. Expect to see at least ten more vendors enter the market.

• On-premise becomes a new word. This last prediction is not really related to analytics (hence the 5 rather than 6 predictions), but I couldn’t resist. People will continue to use the term, “on-premise”, rather than “on-premises” when referring to cloud computing even though it is incorrect. This will continue to drive many people crazy since premise means “a proposition supporting or helping to support a conclusion” (dictionary.com) rather than a singular form of premises. Those of us in the know will finally give up correcting everyone else.

What is advanced analytics?

There has been a lot of discussion recently around advanced analytics. I’d like to throw my definition into the rink. I spent many years at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s and 1990s deploying what I would call advanced analytics. This included utilizing statistical and mathematical models to understand customer behavior, predict retention, or analyze trouble tickets. It also included new approaches for segmenting the customer base and thinking about how to analyze call streams in real time. We also tried to utilize unstructured data from call center logs to help improve the predictive power of our retention models, but the algorithms and the compute power didn’t exist at the time to do this.

Based on my own experiences as well as what I see happening in the market today as an analyst, I view advanced analytics as an umbrella term that includes a class of techniques and practices that go well beyond “slicing and dicing and shaking and baking” data for reports. I would define advanced analytics as:

“Advanced analytics provides algorithms for complex analysis of either structured or unstructured data. It includes sophisticated statistical models, machine learning, neural networks, text analytics, and other advanced data mining techniques. Among its many use cases, it can be deployed to find patterns in data, prediction, optimization, forecasting, and for complex event processing/analysis. Examples include predicting churn, identifying fraud, market basket analysis, or understanding website behavior. Advanced analytics does not include database query and reporting and OLAP cubes. “

Of course, the examples in this definition are marketing-centric and advanced analytics obviously extends into multiple arenas. Hurwitz & Associates is going to do a deep dive into this area in the coming year. We are currently fielding a study about advanced analytics and we’ll be producingadditional reports. For those of you who are interested in completing my survey, here is the link:

Advanced Analytics and the skills needed to make it happen: Takeaways from IBM IOD

Advanced Analytics was a big topic at the IBM IOD conference last week. As part of this, predictive analytics was again an important piece of the story along with other advanced analytics capabilities IBM has developed or is in the process of developing to support optimization. These include Big Insights (for big data), analyzing data streams, content/text analytics, and of course, the latest release of Cognos.

One especially interesting topic that was discussed at the conference was the skills required to make advanced analytics a reality. I have been writing and thinking a lot this subject so I was very happy to hear IBM address it head on during the second day keynote. This keynote included a customer panel and another speaker, Dr. Atul Gawande, and both offered some excellent insights. The panel included Scott Friesen (Best Buy), Scott Futren (Guinnett County Public Schools), Srinivas Koushik (Nationwide), and Greg Christopher (Nestle). Here are some of the interrelated nuggets from the discussions:

• Ability to deliver vs. the ability to absorb. One panelist made the point that a lot of new insights are being delivered to organizations. In the future, it may become difficult for people to absorb all of this information (and this will require new skills too).
• Analysis and interpretation. People will need to know how to analyze and how to interpret the results of an analysis. As Dr. Gawande pointed out, “Having knowledge is not the same as using knowledge effectively.”
• The right information. One of the panelists mentioned that putting analytics tools in the hands of line people might be too much for them, and instead the company is focusing on giving these employees the right information.
• Leaders need to have capabilities too. If executives are accustomed to using spreadsheets and relying on their gut instincts, then they will also need to learn how to make use of analytics.
• Cultural changes. From call center agents using the results of predictive models to workers on the line seeing reports to business analysts using more sophisticated models, change is coming. This change means people will be changing the way that they work. How this change is handled will require special thought by organizations.

IBM executives also made a point of discussing the critical skills required for analytics. These included strategy development, developing user interfaces, enterprise integration, modeling, and dealing with structured and unstructured data. IBM has, of course, made a huge investment in these skills. GBS executives emphasized the 8,500 employees in its Global Business Services Business Analytics and Optimization group. Executives also pointed to the fact that the company has thousands of partners in this space and that 1 in 3 IBMers will attend analytics training. So, IBM is prepared to help companies in their journey into business analytics.

Are companies there yet? I think that it is going to take organizations time to develop some of these skills (and some they should probably outsource). Sure, analytics has been around a long time. And sure, vendors are making their products easier to use and that is going to help end users become more effective. Even if we’re just talking about a lot of business people making use of analytic software (as opposed to operationalizing it in a business process), the reality is that analytics requires a certain mindset. Additionally, unless someone understands the context of the information he or she is dealing with, it doesn’t matter how user friendly the platform is – they can still get it wrong. People using analytics will need to think critically about data, understand their data, and understand context. They will also need to know what questions to ask.

I whole-heartedly believe it is worth the investment of time and energy to make analytics happen.

Please note:

As luck would have it, I am currently fielding a study on advanced analytics! In am interested in understanding what your company’s plans are for advanced analytics. If you’re not planning to use advanced analytics, I’d like to know why. If you’re already using advanced analytics I’d like to understand your experience.

If you participate in this survey I would be happy to send you a report of our findings. Simply provide your email address at the end of the survey! Here’s the link:

Click here to take survey

Who is using advanced analytics?

Advanced analytics is currently a hot topic among businesses, but who is actually using it and why? What are the challenges and benefits to those companies that are using advanced analytics? And, what is keeping some companies from exploring this technology?

Hurwitz & Associates would like your help in answering a short (5 min) survey on advanced analytics. We are interested in understanding what your company’s plans are for advanced analytics. If you’re not planning to use advanced analytics, we’d like to know why. If you’re already using advanced analytics we’d like to understand your experience.

If you participate in this survey we would be happy to send you a report of our findings. Simply provide us your email address at the end of the survey! Thanks!

Here is the link to the survey:
Click here to take survey

Analyzing Big Data

The term “Big Data” has gained popularity over the past 12-24 months as a) amounts of data available to companies continually increase and b) technologies have emerged to more effectively manage this data. Of course, large volumes of data have been around for a long time. For example, I worked in the telecommunications industry for many years analyzing customer behavior. This required analyzing call records. The problem was that the technology (particularly the infrastructure) couldn’t necessarily support this kind of compute intensive analysis, so we often analyzed billing records rather than streams of calls detail records, or sampled the records instead.

Now companies are looking to analyze everything from the genome to Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags to business event streams. And, newer technologies have emerged to handle massive (TB and PB) quantities of data more effectively. Often this processing takes place on clusters of computers meaning that processing is occurring across machines. The advent of cloud computing and the elastic nature of the cloud has furthered this movement.

A number of frameworks have also emerged to deal with large-scale data processing and support large-scale distributed computing. These include MapReduce and Hadoop:

-MapReduce is a software framework introduced by Google to support distributed computing on large sets of data. It is designed to take advantage of cloud resources. This computing is done across large numbers of computer clusters. Each cluster is referred to as a node. MapReduce can deal with both structured and unstructured data. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate pairs and a reduction function that merges these pairs
-Apache Hadoop is an open source distributed computing platform that is written in Java and inspired by MapReduce. Data is stored over many machines in blocks that are replicated to other servers. It uses a hash algorithm to cluster data elements that are similar. Hadoop can cerate a map function of organized key/value pairs that can be output to a table, to memory, or to a temporary file to be analyzed.

But what about tools to actually analyze this massive amount of data?

Datameer

I recently had a very interesting conversation with the folks at Datameer. Datameer formed in 2009 to provide business users with a way to analyze massive amounts of data. The idea is straightforward: provide a platform to collect and read different kinds of large data stores, put it into a Hadoop framework, and then provide tools for analysis of this data. In other words, hide the complexity of Hadoop and provide analysis tools on top of it. The folks at Datameer believe their solution is particularly useful for data greater than 10 TB, where a company may have hit a cost wall using traditional technologies but where a business user might want to analyze some kind of behavior. So website activity, CRM systems, phone records, POS data might all be candidates for analysis. Datameer provides 164 functions (i.e. group, average, median, etc) for business users with APIs to target more specific requirements.

For example, suppose you’re in marketing at a wireless service provider and you offered a “free minutes” promotion. You want to analyze the call detail records of those customers who made use of the program to get a feel for how customers would use cell service if given unlimited minutes. The chart below shows the call detail records from one particular day of the promotion – July 11th. The chart shows the call number (MDN) as well as the time the call started and stopped and the duration of the call in milliseconds. Note that the data appear under the “analytics” tab. The “Data” tab provides tools to read different data sources into Hadoop.

This is just a snapshot – there may be TB of data from that day. So, what about analyzing this data? The chart below illustrates a simple analysis of the longest calls and the phone numbers those calls came from. It also illustrates basic statistics about all of the calls on that day – the average, median, and maximum call duration.

From this brief example, you can start to visualize the kind of analysis that is possible with Datameer.

Note too that since Datameer runs on top of Hadoop, it can deal with unstructured as well as structured data. The company has some solutions in the unstructured realm (such as basic analysis of twitter feeds), and is working to provide more sophisticated tools. Datameer offers its software either on either a SaaS license or on premises.

In the Cloud?

Not surprisingly, early adopters of the technology are using it in a private cloud model. This makes sense since some companies often want to keep control of their own data. Some of these companies already have Hadoop clusters in place and are looking for analytics capabilities for business use. Others are dealing with big data, but have not yet adopted Hadoop. They are looking at a complete “big data BI” type solution.

So, will there come a day when business users can analyze massive amounts of data without having to drag IT entirely into the picture? Utilizing BI adoption as a model, the folks from Datameer hope so. I’m interested in any thoughts readers might have on this topic!

Five requirements for Advanced Analytics

The other day I was looking at the analytics discussion board that I moderate on the Information Management site. I had posted a topic entitled “the value of advanced analytics.” I noticed that the number of views on this topic was at least 3 times as many as on other topics that had been posted on the forum. The second post that generated a lot of traffic was a question about a practical guide to predictive analytics.

Clearly, companies are curious and excited about advanced analytics. Advanced analytics utilizes sophisticated techniques to understand patterns and predict outcomes. It includes complex techniques such as statistical modeling, machine learning, linear programming, mathematics, and even natural language processing (on the unstructured side). While many kinds of “advanced analytics” have been around for the last 20+ years (I utilized it extensively in the 80s) and the term may simply be a way to invigorate the business analytics market, the point is that companies are finally starting to realize the value this kind of analysis can provide.

Companies want to better understand the value this technology brings and how to get started. And, while the number of users interested in advanced analytics continues to increase, the reality is that there will likely be a skills shortage in this area. Why? Because advanced analytics isn’t the same beast as what I refer to as, “slicing and dicing and shaking and baking” data to produce reports that might include information such as sales per region, revenue per customer, etc.

So what skills are needed for the business user to face the advanced analytics challenge? It’s a tough question. There is a certain thought process that goes into advanced analytics. Here are five (there are no doubt, more) skills I would say at a minimum, you should have:

1. It’s about the data. So, thoroughly understand your data. A business user needs to understand all aspects of his or her data. This includes answers to questions such as, “What is a customer?” “What does it mean if a data field is blank?” “Is there seasonality in my time series data?” It also means understanding what kind of derived variables (e.g. a ratio) you might be interested in and how you want to calculate them.
2. Garbage in, Garbage out. Appreciate data quality issues. A business user analyzing data cannot simply assume that the data (from whatever source) is absolutely fine. It might be the case, but you still need to check. Part of this ties to understanding your data, but it also means first looking at the data and asking if it make sense. And, what do you do with data that doesn’t make sense?
3. Know what questions to ask. I remember a time in graduate school when, excited by having my data and trying to analyze it, a wise professor told me not to simply throw statistical models at the data because you can. First, know what questions you are trying to answer from the data. Ask yourself if you have the right data to answer the questions. Look at the data to see what it is telling you. Then start to consider the models. Knowing what questions to ask will require business acumen.
4. Don’t skip the training step. Know how to use tools and what the tools can do for you. Again, it is simple to throw data at a model, especially if the software system suggests a certain model. However, it is important to understand what the models are good for. When does it make sense to use a decision tree? What about survival analysis? Certain tools will take your data and suggest a model. My concern is that if you don’t know what the model means, it makes it more difficult to defend your output. That is why vendors suggest training.
5. Be able to defend your output. At the end of the day, you’re the one who needs to present your analysis to your company. Make sure you know enough to defend it. Turn the analysis upside down, ask questions of it, and make sure you can articulate the output

I could go on and on but I’ll stop here. Advanced analytics tools are simply that – tools. And they will be only as good as the person utilizing them. This will require understanding the tools as well as how to think and strategize around the analysis. So my message? Utilized properly these tools can be great. Utilized incorrectly– well – it’s analogous to a do-it-yourself electrician who burns down the house.

Thoughts from the 6th annual Text Analytics Summit

I just returned from the 6^th annual Text Analytics Summit in Boston.  It was an enjoyable conference, as usual.  Larger players such as SAP and IBM both had booths at the show alongside pure play vendors Clarabridge, Attensity, Lexalytics, and Provalis Research.  This was good to see and it underscores the fact that platform players acknowledge text analytics as an important piece of the information management story.   Additionally, more analysts were at the conference this year, another sign that the text analytics market is becoming more mainstream.   And, most importantly, there were various end-users in attendance and they were looking at using text analytics for different applications (more about that in a second).

Since a large part of the text analytics market is currently being driven by social media and voice of the customer/customer experience management related applications, there was a lot of talk about this topic, as expected.  Despite this, there were some universal themes that emerged which are application agnostic. Interesting nuggets include:

• The value of quantifying success. I found it encouraging that a number of the talks addressed a topic near and dear to my heart:  quantifying the value of a technology.  For example, the IBM folks when describing their Voice of the Customer solution, specifically laid out attributes that could be used to quantify success for call center related applications (e.g. handle time per agent, first call resolution). The user panel in the Clarabridge presentation actually focused part of the discussion on how companies measure the value of text analytics for Customer Experience Management.   Panelists discussed replacing manual processes, identifying the proper issue, and other attributes (some easy to quantify, some not so easy to quantify).  Daniel Ziv, from Verint even cited some work from Forrester that tries to measure the value of loyalty in his presentation on the future of interaction analytics.
• Data Integration. On the technology panel, all of the participants (Lexalytics, IBM, SPSS/IBM, Clarabridge, Attensity) were quick to point out that while social media is an important source of data, it is not the only source.   In many instances, it is important to integrate this data with internal data to get the best read on a problem/customer/etc.  This is obvious but underscores two points.  First, these vendors need to differentiate themselves from the 150+ listening posts and social media analysis SaaS vendors that exclusively utilize social media and are clouding the market.  Second, integrating data from multiple sources is a must have for many companies.  In fact, there was a whole panel discussion on data quality issues in text analytics.  While the structured data world has been dealing with quality and integration issues for years, aside from companies dealing with the quality of data in ECM systems, this is still an area that needs to be addressed.
• Home Grown. I found it interesting that at least one presentation and several end-users I spoke to stated that they have built/will build home grown solutions.  Why? One reason was that a little could go a long way.  For example, Gerand Britton from Constantine Cannon LLP described that the biggest bang for the buck in eDiscovery was performing near duplicate clustering of documents.  This means putting functionality in place that can recognize that an email containing information sent to another person who responds that he or she received it is essentially the same document and a cluster like this should be reviewed by one person rather than two or three.  In order to put this together, the company used some SPSS technology and homegrown functionality.  Another reason for home grown is that companies feel their problem is unique.  A number of attendees I spoke to mentioned that they had either built their own tools or that their problem would require too much customization and they could hire University people to help build specific algorithms.
• Growing Pains.  There was a lot of discussion on two topics related to this.  First, a number of companies and attendees spoke about a new “class” of knowledge worker.  As companies move away from manually coding documents to automating extraction of concepts, entities, etc.  the kind of analysis that will be needed to derive insight will no doubt be different.  What will this person look like?   Second, a number of discussions sprang up around how vendors are being given a hard time about figures such as 85% accuracy in classifying, for example, sentiment.  One hypothesis given for this was that it is a lot easier to read comments and decide what the sentiment should be than reading the output of a statistical analysis.
• Feature vs. Solution?  Text analytics is being used in many, many ways.   This includes building full-blown solutions around problem areas that require the technology to embedding it as part of a search engine or URL shortener.   Most people agreed that the functionality would become more pervasive as time goes on.  People will ultimately use applications that deploy the technology and not even know that it is there.  And, I believe, it is quite possible that many of the customer voice/customer experience solutions will simply become part of the broader CRM landscape through time.

I felt that the most interesting presentation of the Summit was a panel discussion on the semantic web.  I am going to write about that conversation separately and will post it in the next few days.