The Battle to Tame Unstructured Data - ' The Enterprise Approach'

The Enterprise Approach?
Bill Pieroni, global CIO of Chicago-based insurance giant Aon Corp., smiles when he thinks of all the search products that have "enterprise" in their name. "The market has yet to produce an end-to-end enterprise solution," he says. "You can't just add water and stir."

Pieroni is in the middle of an ambitious project to pull structured and unstructured data together from four different data repositories at Combined Insurance Co. of America, an Aon wholly owned subsidiary. The goal? To give the company's call center a more accurate and timely look at a customer's complete profile, including e-mails sent and received, voice messages, and historical documents. "When the operator answers, we need all the information presented," he says. By knowing a customer's complete history, including preferences and needs, Pieroni also wants to improve cross-selling.

Aon's project, which will begin beta testing in the third quarter, has required "no less than several one-off solutions," Pieroni says, because no one system could handle and integrate images, voice mail and contracts. "Clearly the need outstrips the market's ability to serve." Which is why Pieroni is testing the technology on a subsidiary before rolling it out to the rest of Aon. "We needed to focus on a narrow set of data. It is a manageable sandbox."

The technology designed to address the too-much-information syndrome is undeniably improving. As one expert said: Companies that ignore these new and powerful tools do so at their own peril. At the same time, however, the problem is growing faster than the solution, which means that a well-thought-out plan is crucial to choosing the data that will be most helpful in achieving a strategic business initiative.

Eric Pfeiffer is a freelance business and technology writer based in San Francisco.