In perhaps a parody of Socrates famous statement, the Forrester report, Text Analytics Takes Business Insight To New Depths, states that “unexamined content is a wasted opportunity.” They look at an array of tools that go beyond simple search. The Forrester team of Leslie Owens with Matthew Brown, Sara Burnes, and Peter Schmidt conclude through the report subtitle that “An Obscure Technology Has Found Its Killer App.” I would certainly agree and appreciate receiving a review copy of this report.

The authors note that customers, employees, and competitors comment on products, personalities, and companies in increasingly public places, like Twitter and discussion forums. Forrester that online ratings and reviews topped the list of trusted material. The abundance of news and commentary on the Internet could contain actionable knowledge for your business. This is not simply a Web issue as internal sources like emails and call center notes are full of product suggestions, feedback on competitors, and thoughts on the market.  With the rise of enterprise 2.0 and related social media data, the opportunities for data mining and information overload are expanding. To make sense of all this content, businesses are turning to text analytics tools.

The team concludes that this “little-known technology has a compelling value proposition: extract meaning out of large quantities of text by mining, interpreting, and structuring information to reveal hidden patterns and relationships.” I am not so sure about the little known part but I agree with the rest of the statement.  Perhaps I am biased because I have been talking with a lot of vendors in this space.  One of the great opportunities of both Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is all the conversational content that it creates. You would be losing a good bit of the value it you do not look at this content but you need good tools to do it.

The team found that here is too much content to review by hand, It is hard to separate a signal from noise, and here is no way to know what questions to ask.  They add that when you don’t know what’s significant about a set of content, you can’t investigate it with a search engine. The report reviews a number of the major text analytic players and should be useful for those making decisions in this space. Text analytics software typically includes four key components: entity extraction, categorization, relationship mapping, and sentiment analysis.

The authors caution that “until recently, text analytics software was obscure and academic, used primarily by early adopters in the life sciences field… Text analytics is a framework and a process. It is not always necessary or possible to deploy text analytics as a single, linear solution from a single vendor.” It does seem that many of the solutions are complex and are designed to be used by professionals, often with subject matter expertise in linguistics and statistics.  Text analytics firms often partner with search firms to provide additional discovery features for the search tool. I think that the advent of enterprise 2.0 will allow text analytics to come out of the closet and become more mainstream, at least it should. There is much more and you can obtain the report at the Forrerster web site.