Information Access
We cannot say that one type of tool / technology is superior compared to the others. There has to be a judicious mix of technologies to meet the business drivers. At the same time, senior management and the line management should be able to draw their attention where it is necessary at the right time. Information Access Platform(s) should keep in mind the necessary parameters like speed, Cost and Risk Mitigation to service different kinds of information requirements of the Corporates. Most importantly, do-more-with-less should be borne in mind always, with the proliferation of tools and technologies, where their borders have started overlapping with each other.
Corporates feel that their best data sources are their agreements and the mail server databases, where the entire correspondence and details of their third party arrangements are available. But at the same time they cannot let their transactional information attain any lesser importance. Providing information, trends and insights in the transactional information is also necessary. Business users are also interested in building small but quick applications to understand aberrations in their data, and take fast decisions. All these things call for data parsing, data arrangement, data transformation, and data analysis techniques using Search, BI and Interactive Visualisations tools / platforms. Sometimes, Corporates also need to access external / streaming-in data to understand the public opinion about their products / brands and services. All these play an important role in shaping the decision making processes within corporates.
Managing all these technologies to help the decision makers to make informed decisions is important. Most importantly, getting the users access the right information / data is very important, in view of plethora of data sources and tools available. Information Access platforms should take care of parameters like Relationship Effectiveness, Operational Effectivenss, Risk Mitigation and Technology Efficiency in view to drive the Customer Centricity for business improvements.
The challenges to the new information management are: "Findability" of relevant information, Contextual integration of fragmented information, Extraction of intelligence from unstructured data, leveraging and integrating traditional structured data.
Search Platform is fast emerging as a viable Information Access platform: as it easily combines public domain data, unstructured and structured data. It comes across as a Insight Driven Info Platform, by providing Guided Access, Unified Information Access, Knowledge Platform, and sometimes as a Virtual Data Warehouse.
