The boundary between business intelligence and search technologies is beginning to blur, and information and knowledge management professionals should take advantage of this convergence to provide businesspeople better context and information to make daily decisions, Forrester Research said in a recent report.
Within large corporations today, neither BI nor search tools alone can deliver full business insight. Search tools can crawl, index and retrieve just about any kind of information, structured or unstructured, but fall short on helping the user decide what to do with the information. BI tools are great at helping businesspeople make sense of structured data, but have limitations in pulling unstructured content like text and documents into analysis.
Fortunately, the ongoing convergence of BI and search will help "bridge the artificial system boundaries between structured data and unstructured content," Forrester said in "Search + BI = Unified Information Access." "It will not only affect the interfaces we use to search for, discover, analyze, and report on what we need to know, but help us learn more about what we don't know."
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://intelligententerprise.com