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Thoughts on 2009
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As the year draws to a close, I’ve been evaluating text analytics and its potential in 2009. For many software and solution providers, the text analytics journey has been dominated by the challenges of educating customers and creating a market. Much of that work remains, but I’ve seen a fundamental shift in the second half of 2008. In spite of a difficult economy, we have seen considerable interest in learning more about the benefits of text analytics. If the latter part of this year is any indicator, I see great potential for text analytics in the coming year.
As we know, text analytics has its roots in the intelligence community, with a growing presence in law enforcement. Much has also been written about “Voice” oriented text solutions that capture the sentiment of customers, employees, markets and even citizens - but what about the many other areas where insight from text translates to business value? From my perspective, the use of text analytics will broaden to support several other business challenges. I’ve spent some time analyzing these potential use cases and will summarize my thoughts here.
Voice of the customer, employee, market, and citizen will continue to expand. In an Obama administration, technology will play a prominent role. His campaign effectively used Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with and understand the electorate. This same technology may find a place within the Federal Government’s technology roadmap. These Web 2.0 capabilities spawn volumes of text data that contain valuable insights. I can see many applications of text technologies in support of government initiatives that leverage Web 2.0 to capture the voice of the citizen. Beyond the “Voice” applications, there are a number of business challenges that will be addressed by Text Analytics in 2009.
For starters, the Insurance Industry’s focus on fraud detection is accelerating. With the downturn in the economy, the Industry expects to see an increase in fraud activity. With this increase comes an urgent need to identify fraud earlier in the process. We are seeing a growing interest in using text to shed light on this fraud activity, and a realization that integrating text and structured data improves fraud detection accuracy while reducing false positives. An opportunity to improve the broader claims process exists, as insight from text begins to improve other functions such as underwriting. There is also an accelerating focus on anti-money laundering solutions in this industry, and I believe the use of text will enhance those capabilities as well.
In the risk management arena, text technologies will help to better identify areas of risk (e.g. insider trading) by providing visibility to information buried in documents, emails and other forms of text. With regard to regulatory compliance, there is an opportunity to leverage text technology to more effectively comply with regulations and find areas of non-compliance. With the digitization of information significantly impacting the traditional legal discovery process, and regulations like the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in place, text analytics is primed to accelerate the e-discovery process, reduce cost and the risk of compliance violations.
Here’s one that I have not seen discussed much. In this difficult economy, there is an intense focus on reducing spend wherever possible. Wasteful spending is not always visible to Executives who are sometimes forced to make across the board budget cuts. Evidence of wasteful spending may be found in emails, contracts, business cases, capital expenditure requests and other business documents. Quickly expanding the base of information to include these documents can provide greater spending insight and enable more effective spend analysis.
Also, consider the role of text analytics in better enabling the document intensive M&A due diligence process. How about auditing repositories to ensure compliance with policies and procedures? I believe there are countless opportunities for forward looking business people to exploit text analytics.
The bottom line as I see it is that organizations are seeing the opportunity to leverage the insight from text to address key business challenges. Organizations can realize a rapid and significant ROI by using this insight to understand the sentiment of customers, employees, markets or citizens, quickly find fraud or money laundering activity, cost-effectively comply with regulations and support litigation, more effectively manage risk and brand reputation, better facilitate quality and safety reviews, better identify wasteful spending, accelerate M&A due diligence and many others.
We at enherent are excited about text analytics in 2009. We wish you all a Happy Holiday season.
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