Defining Challenges of Unstructured Data Management through Master Data Management

Try PIM Cost Calculator

insight
Blog
By: Sagar Sharma

Defining Challenges of Unstructured Data Management through Master Data Management

The main master data domains are customers, products, locations, and others. Qualitative data or unstructured data are usually text-heavy like social media conversations and open-ended survey responses. However, such data includes audio, video, and images. It is a suitable time to explore how an effective master data management system addresses the unstructured data challenges.

Master data are all the core data within the business for describing objects around which the business is conducted. This data type usually changes infrequently and includes reference data required for operating the business. This data is not transactional. However, it describes transactions.

What is Unstructured Data?

Unstructured data is information that has not been structured in any predefined way. It is also known as qualitative data. It is usually text-heavy such as open-ended survey responses and including the images, audio, and video content. Examples of unstructured data are web pages, customer feedback, emails, social media, business documents, and images, audio, and video.

The three main categories of data are unstructured, structured, and semi-structured. These three categories of data offer incredible insights. You must know what type of data to collect when to collect data, and which data to analyze for the insights.

Unstructured data is configured in a method that is very difficult to analyze. Social media posts belong to this category and include topics being discussed and opinions. Structured data is easy to analyze and organized in a pre-defined structured format. The framework of structured data models is useful for easy data search, entry, extraction, and comparison. Semi-structural data is text-heavy data, however loosely organized into Meta tags and further divided into its groups.

Why is Unstructured Data so important?

Unstructured data is growing quickly as increased usage of digital services and applications. It is valuable to businesses when analyzed correctly. It provides a wealth of insights. The maximum data created nowadays belongs to the unstructured type. You have to manage the unstructured data in the right way and get countless insights to make informed and also data-driven decisions.

Machine learning technology lets the user automatically manages and analyze unstructured data accurately and quickly. Machines nowadays can read the text the same as humans because of technological advancements such as natural language processing. Users of such machines can eliminate repetitive tasks such as sifting through social media posts.

Artificial Intelligence technology learns how to extract keywords, phone numbers, names, and locations automatically. It also understands opinions and recognizes the topics important to the business. If you have organized unstructured data, then it will become easier to make the business decision much easier with proper longer vision.

Unstructured data analytics tools are designed for gathering and analyzing unstructured information. Proper use of the unstructured data analytics tools, machine learning, and natural language processing capabilities gives you different benefits like gaining valuable insights, customer service tickets, and scanning through emails automatically.

You can get the following benefits from unstructured data analytics tools.

1. Enhance the customer experience

Text analytics systems are designed to monitor live chats, emails, customer support tickets, and social media posts in real-time. These systems automatically route tickets to the appropriate departments within a few seconds and do not let customers leave waiting. You can streamline the process of sorting unstructured data based on categories.

Artificial intelligence tools analyze customer support information and ensure that customers get the essential support on time. Users of these tools do not have to manually monitor their employees.

2. Discover gaps in the market and innovate

Every user of the unstructured data can follow trends in the market and make essential changes before their competition. They are happy to use the AI software for monitoring news reports, online reviews of competitors, and social media. They are satisfied with an easy way to make informed business decisions.

It is a suitable time to analyze and track the online content of competitors to know what works best for them. You can identify your strengths and weaknesses. You can find new methods to develop your business.

Unstructured data analysis tools read through the text and give an easy-to-understand view of used words as well as phrases within the dataset. Word clouds are the visualization of the words in a text used, mostly appearing larger than others. You can find important words and compare such words to your competition. You can get the maximum granular insights when you use modern unstructured data analytics tools.

3. Listen to customers

Machine learning tools read through open-ended customer surveys as well as an email automatically. You can also track unsolicited feedback from social media, blogs, and online reviews. You can track the company name, use the machine learning tool to find keywords specific to your business niche. You can perform sentiment analysis for automatically detecting the writer’s opinion.

Challenges of Managing Unstructured Data

The accessibility and usage of unstructured data for analytic, regulatory, and decision-making purposes drive the requirements for searching and scrutinizing data. The overall volume of the unstructured data is set to grow every year. The usual data management processes nowadays are automated with the best tools and enhanced further with the delivery as a service.

Businesses nowadays require powerful scale-out solutions for unstructured data management. Efficient use of business intelligence, machine learning, and analytics tools is helpful to business people to make informed decisions and develop the business further. There are different challenges for managing unstructured data. However, some of these challenges are as follows.

1. The long waiting period to detect new and changed data

Scanning a large volume of data can result in a long as well as painful wait. Regular changes on the maximum volumes of billions of small files and parsing complete storage file systems need efficient and quick technology. You can use modern resources to collect the new, changed, and deleted files on the entire storage devoid of the painful parsing of the entire storage file system. Many companies seek ways to avoid the full file-free scans whenever an archive, backup, or synchronization task has to be performed.

2. The inability for protecting the data at risk

Daily backup windows of many organizations cannot handle incremental backups as too many files are changed or added. They are faced with some consequential decisions like having to choose which volumes of data to protect or not to protect with unsatisfactory retention as well as frequencies.

Modern technical applications include optimized incremental processes to ensure that every modified and new data is collected for minimizing the backup window and providing the entire data restore capabilities.

3. Complex data management

Traditional methods usually rely on multiple data protection solutions to try and work around each solution’s limitations. Companies pass 4 or 5 data protection solutions frequently. This is mainly because of various requirements raising the costs of separate software or hardware, and storage resources. You can use a reliable company and get the best resources to control hundreds of nodes on a single system and ensure a powerful data management process.

4. Long service level agreement and recovery time objective

Every business has to deal with massive volumes of data along with the complexity of different categories of backup processes. They make the entire data protection and ensure the business continuity a complex and long endeavor. Managing the unstructured data on time is a challenging thing for everyone, especially beginners to the competitive business sector.

You may have decided to manage the unstructured data and make a good decision to develop the business further. You can clarify your doubts and make certain different benefits from the proper use of the resources for managing the unstructured data, by consulting the experts. You will be happy to develop the business with the long service level agreements and encouraged to achieve the business objectives.

What is Master Data Management (MDM)?

Master Data Management (MDM) is the processes, technology, and tools designed to ensure the master data is well-coordinated across the business. It provides a unified master data service. It is very useful to provide consistent, accurate, and complete master data across the enterprise as well as business partners.

There are some important things to consider when you explore and use the MDM. MDM is not just any modern technological problem. Master Data Management includes creating and maintaining master data. Fundamental changes to the business processes are needed for maintaining the clean master data. You can invest the maximum effort, time, and money for creating a consistent and clean set of master data.

MDM may cover a single domain or multiple domains based on the technology used. The main benefits of multi-domain master data management are reduced technology footprint, consistent data stewardship, and the option to share reference data across the entire domain.

To know more about MDM and its benefits, visit What is Master Data Management & How Can It Benefit Your Business?

How MDM Systems Solves the Challenges of Unstructured Data?

Digital revolution is very important for successful enterprise growth. Managing unstructured data is not an easy thing for all beginners. An effective master data management system solves almost every challenge of unstructured data.

The prevalence of unstructured data nowadays represents a security risk and a rising opportunity cost for many businesses. You can explore the following details explaining how the master data management system solves the unstructured data’s challenges.

1. Better data quality

The main factors affecting the unstructured data are mainly because of machines and individuals being unable to process, analyze, and store the information usefully. A good MDM system is designed to clean as well as organize unstructured data and align them toward the requirements of multiple stakeholders. Thus, the same data can be accessed by the human resource and the machine system in the configuration.

2. Integration with the enterprise data

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are used to provide enterprise data integration. MDM systems parse unstructured MDM data successfully in different aspects like the semantic and sentiment analysis procedures for identifying and structuring data through the assessment of taxonomy and metadata to every file.

A powerful MDM platform can link and match information with the master data files after data structures have been identified. This platform also integrates it into the enterprise system.

3. Data search and accessibility

Business people like to access data from so many channels through an intuitive search interface. On the other hand, enterprise search algorithms cannot parse unstructured data and end in poor search results.

The best MDM systems make use of the application programming interfaces for indexing files across the enterprise, building an integrated and system-agnostic search capability, and using a combination of cross-referencing to source as well as metadata tagging for searching and linking multiple data formats.

4. Accurate customer targeting

The deluge of unstructured information streaming in from so many customer touch-points provides a new paradigm for customer relationship management as well as lead nurturing. You can build customized experiences by accessing customer preferences and shopping behavior. You can also segment the target markets and target the appropriate buyers with the best products on time.

Reliable customer data are vital to get an array of benefits from master data management. A good MDM system tackles the customer data management challenges by enhancing and connecting the customer information streams and supporting businesses to make smart decisions.

5. Improved data security

You must know where your data is stored so that you can secure it. There is a security challenge for almost every business today. MDM platforms assist users to throw out duplications and let users manage all their important data from one central repository.

Proper implementation of the MDM platform facilitates enterprise-wide security practices like user authentication and authorization, security alerts for deviations from existing processes, and access logs and reporting.

Bottom Line

Every business owner is willing to develop the business in professional methods regularly. Proper use of modern and user-friendly resources for business development attracts almost everyone in the competitive business sector and gives them the confidence to use such resources.

You can prefer and use the best-in-class nature of the master data management platforms for successfully addressing the unstructured data challenges. You will get 100% satisfaction and achieve your business goals without complexity. You will be encouraged to become number one in your business sector.

PIM Cost Calculator

Wondering about the investment involved in implementing a PIM solution? Get an estimate to plan your budget effectively with our PIM Cost Calculator.