Don’t Blow Big Data Out of Proportion

I’ll bet many of you have heard the term “Big Data” before. You’d think from the way it is hyped that Big Data is the future of… everything.  Like many new technical advances, the tech marketing machine is blowing Big Data a bit out of proportion.  It’s true that information gleaned from data repositories give business managers and researchers insights they’ve not had before.

And so, amid all the pixy dust, is a set of real solutions.  The promise of pulling together large amounts of data from multiple sources, then sifting it for insight and intelligence could be a huge addition to your decision-making arsenal.

Fact is, KwikTag can provide you with the value of Big Data today.

In order to provide you with a little historical foundation, the first thing to know is Big Data isn’t new.  We have always had “Big Data … Bases”. Banks, insurance companies, retailers and others all have very large databases that store transactional data – sales results, bank records, inventory, accounting information etc. This is what’s called “structured” data.  For the last twenty years, Big Data meant creating a Data Warehouse or Data Mart of structured data and querying it for new insight.  The value you got from the warehouse was directly proportionate the how sophisticated your query was.

What’s different about the Big Data of today is that the data sets can now include “unstructured data”. Electronic documents or a captured document image that has been turned into a readable document are the best known examples of unstructured data.  But in this day and age of social media and messaging, information from these sources can be included in your Big Data database too.

You may not know it, but KwikTag works with both structured and unstructured information. We can store, retrieve, search and categorize unstructured information of all types.  We capture paper documents, electronic documents, emails, data streams, and pictures in our unstructured data warehouse.  We also store structured information in our SQL database for fast retrieval and creating document associations.

We provide you the best of both worlds.  One of our value-add to unstructured information retrieval and analysis is our patented ability to marry the two types of data we capture and store.  We call it IntelliView.  KwikTag can automatically relate a transaction in an ERP system to the documents associated with it with the click of a button.

We can also relate documents to one another and documents of different types can be assembled into a “Case” for easy contextual viewing.   We will dig into KwikTag’s Case Management capabilities in a future Blog post.

My point is that we make getting to the information you need when you need it a snap.  Importantly we specialize in giving you only the information you need when you need it.  No need to sort through  10,000 hits from a search – unless you want to that is.  KwikTag gives you the benefits of Big Data today, and fora lot less money than you might think.

– Randy

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net