"Evolution of a contextual view of information"
Integrating Structured and Unstructured Data/Information within the Enterprise
The Problem
The launch of relational databases and data warehousing led to a revolution in the ability of corporations to collect, organize, query and manage information about their customers, prospects, products and financials, often referred to as structured information. At the same time, it is well known that approximately 80% of the information which is created within the same corporation is in-fact unstructured information - which means that it lives in documents rather than being organized in a database. This information represents the heart-blood of the organization and needs to be organized and accessible at least as much, if not more so than structured information.
Figure 1. Hierarchical Views
In order to manage this mass of information, organizations created hierarchical views - essentially creating folders (directories) in which to organize their documents.
Does this technique work? It may work for very low quantities of information where the type of content is similar. However, this approach does not work as soon as users need to see information in different business contexts. As the amount of information increases and diversifies, business context plays a vital role in how people wish to utilize information.
Take the example shown in Figure 1 - here we use hierarchies to organize project related information.
This works as long as we only need to gain access to information, based on which project we are looking at i.e. the key structural component in this example is project name (e.g. Barcelona, London). As soon as we would like to view project information based on a different criteria, we have an issue e.g. I would like to see a list of all the project plans for projects which had a revenue of 100K Euro or more, which we performed in the Automotive industry. This sounds like the sort of query one would use within a structured (relational DB) environment, the problem is that this is not possible with the hierarchical view approach.
The Solution
The solution needed must be able to pull all types of information (both structured and unstructured) into relational context so that it can be used effectively in an intelligent manner. The business goals we are addressing here, are:
- Improved access, integration and management of information and improved the quality of decision making
- Improved productivity and workflow, reduced cost and achieve greater output with fewer resources
- Build tighter relationships, reduce cycle time and improve customer service and support
- By building a business context information community and providing intelligent access to information, we are reducing the impact of loss of knowledge, when employees leave the company
Figure 2. Business Knowledge Channels
At the heart of the Tornado Business Center™ software, we have a technology which enables unstructured information to be organized in the same way as it would be within a relational database. At the same time, we provide multiple, configurable views - which we call Business Knowledge Channels™ to allow users to retrieve information in whichever business context makes most sense for them. This technology, which we call Adaptive Business Modeling™ is a unique breakthrough in combining structured and unstructured information.
As can be seen in Figure 2 (above), we are able to provide multiple dynamic views in order to gain access to information. Only storing the document one time within the system - users can always locate the information based on their business context, no matter how they would like to organize it.
How fast can you change views ?
One of our major design goals for Tornado was to keep it simple for users to change the way they organize and look at their data. With this in my, we developed an complete GUI based interface which uses our Click & Model™ technology.
What about performance ?
Having the ability to create dynamic views of potentially tens or hundreds of thousands documents may seem like a performance nightmare. Using traditional methods of relational databases, it would be. This is why Intergral have come up with a new technology which we call the Virtual Query Engine™. Built as a Java servlet, this component gives users the performance they expect and un-paralleled flexibility when querying and organizing information.
No other solution is able to provide the flexibility or speed in being able to manage, organize and distribute information - this is why Tornado Business Center™ really does deliver "a new dimension in organizing information".
