Enterprise data and documents are created so that they can be used in the future. This can be understood as exploiting their potential for gaining business advantage, and in some cases it is simply a matter of ‘producing’, storing and using them by necessity.
Of course, the ultimate goal is to make it easy to retrieve relevant information from the entire enterprise data estate, using the appropriate search solution. As a first step in the process, it is essential that all documents and all data are collected.
But there are many obstacles to overcome when collecting enterprise data. What are these difficulties?
Divergent systems
Any formal and informal internal documents can be part of the company’s data assets. These can be generated in document management software or customer relationship management system, email application or other systems used within the organisation. Moreover, completely different software and document management systems may be implemented in the subsidiaries of an enterprise. This can also mean difficulties in case of a company merge. And this diversification poses a huge challenge in terms of data collection.
Paper-based management
Despite the headway of digitalisation, many organisations still use paper-based documents. These documents are used to be collected solely in binders and folders, but nowadays the growing demand for information has made it unadmittable to process them only in physical form.
Such paper-based management makes digital data collection processes difficult and time-consuming, and requires the usage of OCR technology.
Learn more about how optical character recognition and text analytics are helping modern business administration.
Sticking to familiar methods
Probably these old-fashioned requests are familiar:
- Could you please find me the article about that downtown property?
- Could you forward me the email that the maintenance company sent us last year?
We are still witnessing these type of sentences in many daily situation. In these cases the company or organisation likely has the manpower and time resources to solve the given task, and thus the need for change and for modernization of the information flow has not yet been felt (especially not by the decision-makers).
As long as this does not cause operational disruption in the life of the company, the business-as-usual approach will continue to hamper modern data collection and processing.
More about enterprise data collection
The main purpose of data collection is to achieve the retrievability of the corporate data assets. Find out more about the 5 reasons why enterprise search is becoming increasingly important and how to make it possible to use one search engine above all.
Fear of information leak
Company data is often sensitive, as it may be linked to personal rights or trade secrets. For businesses that store large amounts of such sensitive data – especially in the financial or security sector – it is essential to keep their data secure, which is why they often insist on a low-tech but secure and proven system. This is a very understandable reason, thus it is essential in case of implementation a new system to choose a partner that does not become the owner of the data during the collection process.
Lack of IT skills
There are many businesses that, due to their size, currently manage relatively few documents, but the amount is growing exponentially thanks to dynamic growth. This process can be manageable but only for a limited time. Moreover, in many cases, these – typically small sized – companies do not employ IT staff or administrators to whom the employees can turn for help. And staff members are not expected to be familiar with the systems and software that can solve the problem. Often even IT professionals are not aware of the solutions available on the market.
There is a solution
Despite the difficulties of data collection, there are software solutions that can be used to collect the company’s data assets (including web-based contents) and make them searchable from a single interface.
The text analytics solutions developed and integrated by Precognox cover the full range of processes from data collection to intelligent search. Thanks to these, data collection and the implementation of the process is no longer a problem.
Data collection from the internet
TAS Data Collector is able to retrieve unstructured data from the Internet by organizing the content into a structured format, making it available to other information systems and making it suitable for further processing, analysis or visualization.
