IBM Information Governance Solutions

Managing information within the enterprise has always been a vital and important task to support the day-to-day business operations and to enable analysis of that data for decision making to better manage and grow the business for improved profitability. To do all that, clearly the data must be accurate and organized so it is accessible and understandable to all who need it. That task has grown in importance as the volume of enterprise data has been growing significantly (analyst estimates of 40 - 50% growth per year are not uncommon) over the years. However, most of that data has been what we call "structured" data, which is the type that can fit neatly into rows and columns and be more easily analyzed. Now we are in the era of "big data." This significantly increases the volume of data available, but it is in a form called "unstructured" data. That is, data from sources that are not as easily organized, such as data from emails, spreadsheets, sensors, video, audio, and social media sites. There is valuable information in all that data but it calls for new processes to enable it to be analyzed.