About 90% of the data generated in the world every day is unstructured data, and its volume is grows 55-60% each year. It is difficult to analyze and not easily searchable. But if harnessed correctly, it could become a valuable asset for an organization.
What is unstructured data?
Unstructured data could be any data that doesn’t have a recognizable structure. It could be any format or type of data – text files, photos, video or audio files, web pages, blog posts, social media posts, presentations, call transcripts/recordings, open-ended survey responses, etc. Interestingly, a large bulk of the data generated each day is unstructured data. Every organization has unimaginable volumes of unstructured data, but how many of them really focus on trying to study or analyze it? How many of them really take out the time or put in the energy or even employ the skilled professionals needed to study and analyze this unstructured data? Unstructured data is generally generated by human activities – directly or indirectly, and is people-oriented. It doesn’t usually slot itself into near database tables, and would have no organized format or structure; it most likely wouldn’t even have any repeatability. And in this chaos, lies huge potential for organizations to transform the way it takes decisions.
Organizations have harnessed the power of structured data for many years now, but doing the same for unstructured data takes special tools and techniques, as well as professionals who are skilled in working with it. There algorithms powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning that can analyze large volumes of unstructured data, in a time span that is practically impossible with manual efforts. There are Big Data tools and platforms, such as, Hadoop, which can process, mine, integrate, store, track, index and report business insights from raw unstructured data. When analyzed and studied, this unstructured data could have a huge impact on customer analytics, marketing intelligence and so many other business areas.
When unstructured data from different customer-facing sources, such as, call transcripts, online product reviews, conversation records from the chatbot, records of tags and mentions across different social media platforms, etc. is analyzed using the right tools and techniques, then it could lead to identification of important patterns and insights that would help understand the current scenario in the market, to understand the customers and target audience better, and to improve the overall experience customers have with the brand. It can also help understand the impact and customer response for different products, ideas and/or initiatives. It can also help understand what’s going with the competitors and how the customers or target audience is responding to them. Equipped with this information, organizations could shape their marketing strategies and develop the right marketing mix. It helps organizations figure out what’s worth spending money on and what is not.
Studying and analyzing unstructured data can also help organizations uncover compliance or regulatory issues a lot sooner than otherwise. By doing this, businesses can also avert huge negative impacts and negative publicities for itself. Tools and techniques like natural language processing, sentiment analysis, pattern recognition, speech-to-text conversations through machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms are immensely helpful in realizing the potential of unstructured data.
However, to be able to take advantage of enormous amounts of unstructured data that organizations have access to, they would need to knock down the data silos that they have built for themselves till date. Instead, organizations would need to work towards building a scalable data hub, which could not only store all the data safely, but also help track it and analyze it when required. A good way to help the data-illiterate individuals understand data better is to employ the services of skilled data translators who would be able to comb through mountains of data and translate it into stories, visuals, and various other formats that anybody can easily comprehend and interpret. It would also be helpful to create a customized dashboard based on what data an individual needs and how it could be presented in a manner to help them understand it better. These dashboards could present the basic insights in a visual/graphical format and lead to more detailed analysis and interpretations in further screens which can be accessed based on individual requirements. They key point here is to represent the data and insights as visually as possible.
With the rising trend of organizations going global, having employees located in different parts of the world, with more and more employees working remotely or being constantly on the road, having these dashboards and derived information available on the cloud, accessible from anywhere at any time, from any device is immensely helpful.
As the world embraces Industry 4.0 and begins implementing it in their organizations everywhere, it is imperative for them to understand the importance and value of data – structured and unstructured. Not doing so, could be the fatal ice berg for them. Just as a document written in a foreign language is useless unless there are people who can read and translate it into a language everyone can understand, data is effectively useless unless it has been translated and presented in a way that the stakeholders can understand, made into something that can help answer important questions and help makes informed strategic decisions.
Cognixia – world’s leading digital workforce solutions company leaves no stone unturned to train individuals and organizational workforce across the world in the field of data science , helping them take a leap towards a fulfilling, successful career with accomplishments that could be path-breaking for the world. Our carefully crafted training programs, taught by industry experts keen to teach their craft, encompass everything you need to learn or have your workforce learn to be able to play with data making a jumble of words and numbers that would make no sense to an ordinary person into extraordinary facts and figures that could change the world. To know more about our data science programs, reach out to us today! You can call us on +91-85111-35819 or write to us at join@cognixia.com and we promise to respond back as soon as possible.
