Success Demands Solutions for the Convergence of Unstructured and Structured Data

Craig Smith, VP of Xenos Group Inc.

Financial institutions are grappling with vast volumes of structured and unstructured data that continue to escalate at an unprecedented rate. According to IDC, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. In addition, by 2011 the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. While not all information created and transmitted gets stored, by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

These growing trends, driven in large part by Web 2.0 applications and services as well as other forms of real-time content sharing, are creating concern amongst C-level executives for more effective enterprise report and content management (ERM/ECM) processes.

This escalation has created a sizeable dilemma for those in the financial sector. As they move towards collaboration and customer experience enhancement initiatives, most existing enterprise information architectures are simply not up to the task of addressing current and growing storage, archival and retrieval demands.

With the advent of digital media, the explosion in the quantity of unstructured data is becoming nothing short of astronomical. Financial institutions are now finding themselves flooded with a wide array of unstructured documents such as emails, reports, statements, spreadsheets, letters and forms, among others. At the same time, these organizations are grappling with massive volumes of structured information in data streams housed in disparate transactional databases. With a few possible exceptions, these two halves of the data equation have yet to converge in any manageable way.

Convergence in thought not deed

Whether the issue is electronic bill presentment or regulatory compliance, the management, archiving and retrieval of all this data in whatever form is now placing inordinate demands on storage infrastructure complexity and costs. While many financial services companies have survived by managing disparate business and IT (i.e. application) sides of the data picture, this approach is quickly becoming unsustainable. The key to creating the levels of operational efficiency needed moving forward is through the convergence of structured and unstructured data and documents.

There is no question that organizations are on board with the idea of convergence in principle. A 2007 Accenture survey of North American and European CIOs for example revealed that more than 75% want to develop an overall information strategy in the next three years, yet 85% are “not even close to employing an enterprise-wide content management strategy”.

When asked what would change their approach to ECM, a majority (63%) ranked the ability to provide more seamless access to unstructured content as the top priority. Other items of note in the study include the following:

• Nearly 60% of respondents acknowledged that adopting an integrated approach to data is the path to achieving true competitive differentiation
• Only 14% of respondents believe they are close to having true integration of unstructured and structured information
• 92% indicate their information strategy involves classic, structured data
• Nearly one-half (47%) of IT managers admit to spending 30% of their work week trying to find the right information for their jobs, while less than half (44%) of IT managers feel the information they do receive has value.

Integration of structured and unstructured data is much more than a productivity concern however. Inaccurate or incomplete content can lead to serious ramifications on everything from sales and new business development to auditing and regulatory compliance.

The view from the top

Once content with assigning the task of storage and data management to IT executives and their teams, C-level executives are finally taking notice on how changes in the document processing landscape are beginning to impact critical business processes beyond basic storage and archiving.

A major driver behind this growing concern is the issue of compliance risk. According to Gartner, as enterprises face evolving compliance and discovery requirements, demands for the management and retention of historical information are becoming increasingly complex. As the volume and diversity of electronically stored content continues to increase dramatically, Gartner states, “Organizations will need to intertwine their content governance and retention policies with information archiving technologies to meet their commitments effectively.”

Of course it has always been incumbent on financial institutions to manage corporate data. However, the new-found complexity presented by escalating volumes of diverse sources of unstructured data makes the job all that much harder – and the risks that much higher. The Enron scandal for example is a classic case of a situation that was brought to light mainly through a search of email content.

Since that event, the practice of e-discovery has quickly established itself as an integral part of risk management. It also means that searches now require filtering through millions of documents for specific information, which in many cases, are not adequately indexed, searchable or retrievable. As a result, the costs associated with performing this process can be staggering and the results often short of ideal.

Adding to that is the ever-growing need to deliver self-service applications to provide customers, customer service representatives and business partners with online access to statements and billing information. This is putting even more pressure on financial services organizations to consolidate disparate archives of unstructured and structured data.

The technology approach

There are very few technologies in existence today that actually can handle both structured and unstructured data for multiple business applications – from print and archiving to e-discovery and records managements. Fortunately, this is changing.

For the first time, innovative companies are bringing products and technology to market that can integrate structured and unstructured data within the same platform and handle the highly scalable volumes required by Global 2000 companies. Xenos Group for one has built its reputation on designing scalable solutions that process, transform, repurpose and personalize high volumes of data and documents for storage, real-time access and delivery in a variety of formats across multiple channels.

More importantly, given today’s IT infrastructure investments, this ability to streamline enterprise information supply chains can be integrated seamlessly with existing technology investments to lower costs and improve overall operational efficiency.

The specific functions necessary for more effective ECM processes include:

• Data capture, translation, transformation and intelligent routing
• Document composition and assembly for personalized customer correspondence
• Document format transformation, indexing, repurposing
• Document and image archiving and migration
• ERM archiving and ECM repository integration
• Electronic message routing
• Multi-channel content delivery
• ePresentment for online statement/document viewing and access

The heart of this technology approach is a server-based infrastructure solution that manages the requisite resources for data and document transformation. It can do this from a single location within the enterprise to enable the flexible sharing and exchange of information assets with customers, employees, business units and trading partners.

In simple terms, a server-based infrastructure approach provides the architectural framework that enables organizations with vast content repositories (often attained through acquisition) to migrate disparate legacy documents and images into fewer or a single, more agile archive. Among other benefits, consolidation can dramatically reduce the costs associated with storage, duplicate site licenses, maintenance, training and support.

Essential capabilities within this framework include:

Data transformation - Data transformation services can dynamically translate, transform and intelligently route a variety of structured data formats over the Internet and across disparate platforms to enable the real time, high-volume exchange of electronic data at lower cost and with greater adaptability than proprietary EDI technology, to meet changing business requirements. The ability to dynamically manipulate transformed data enables organizations to re-purpose, share and deliver data, while eliminating costly integration services and third-party contracts with integrators.

Document transformation – Documents are transformed and repurposed from print streams into the appropriate electronic formats. It requires among other things, the ability to capture, index, transform and repurpose high volumes of production print stream data into business-critical applications for enterprise report management, as well as enterprise content management archiving, retrieval, presentment and delivery.

Configuration and administration – Enterprises can simplify the process of defining business process flows, defining and maintaining projects, and configuring data and document transformation and business logic through an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) and deploying them throughout the organization. This approach provides a single view of all processes to enable user training, reduce administrative overhead, and ensure the rapid deployment and maintenance of complex projects for a faster return on investment.

ePresentment applications – These enable organizations to provide customers with online access to relevant and highly personalized information, such as credit card, personal banking, and brokerage statements or insurance policies and Explanation of Benefits documents. In cases where an online bill presentment application is already in place, additional capabilities can integrate with existing document archives to enable data consolidation from multiple billing systems. Enterprises can improve the customer experience by creating a single, unified communication; as well as enhance online bill presentment by dynamically incorporating personalized marketing messages to increase overall business value, especially to preferred or high net-worth customers.

Business Logic Services – These services enable organizations to implement the precise business logic they need, make informed routing decisions and extend the value of their data and documents to ensure rapid application deployment and maintenance. Overall, it simplifies the challenge of integrating data between multiple disparate applications by providing an interface to enable communication between systems with incompatible data and document formats.

Document composition – This enables the creation and delivery of highly effective, integrated document solutions for personalized business communications such as 1-to-1 customer correspondence, statements, policies, and financial reports using customer-preferred formats and channels (e.g. e-mail, Web presentment and print). Document composition capabilities can be instrumental in improving the customer experience, building strong client and partner relations, increasing loyalty and retention, driving new customer acquisition, and drastically reducing the time to revenue.

Cases in point

To better assess how data and document convergence can drive operational efficiency and productivity, following is a brief overview of key projects that have benefited from adopting a server-based infrastructure solution:

• A major issuer of credit card statements with 50 million active accounts (18 million of which are presented online) was working with disparate statement and image delivery solutions that required extensive integration efforts. By adopting an archive consolidation strategy, it was able to deliver a more consistent user experience and use the presentation tools for statements and transactions across all lines of business while rationalizing its current technology infrastructure. Print services and statement composition processes can still be created using existing formats, while the resulting PDF or PNG documents can be delivered to the customer’s browser.
• A large financial services firm with a hosted mainframe statement and report solution used enabling technology to transform and normalize 200 million statement pages in IBM AFP format for storage and then dynamically retrieve and transform individual statements to PDF format with sub-second response for viewing and/or printing. This allowed the enterprise to reduce planned storage infrastructure requirements by 90% and save millions of dollars.
• Another financial services firm had a number of silos of disparate statement archives in incompatible document formats. These needed to be consolidated for viewing online by CSRs. Using technology to parse, transform, index, compress and store statements in native format; as well as dynamically retrieve and transform data on the fly for Web viewing, it was able to consolidate statements onto a single archive and provide one access point to electronic documents, saving significant ongoing maintenance fees and support costs.
• An insurance company needed to improve the look and ease of use of its billing correspondence. By integrating technology to enable data transformation; statement redesign; generate indexed documents for archiving/indexing; and publishing for secure online access via a Web-based portal, the company was able to improve the bill design and go to market 50% faster, while enabling online access to both its agents and its customers.

Managing the information overload

These are just a sampling of the efficiency and productivity gains that have been achieved through various iterations of technology applications to address the challenge of data and document convergence. While financial institutions today are aware of the mounting problems associated with managing, storing and retrieving structured and unstructured data from multiple sources, only a small %age have taken the necessary steps to enable convergence.

Gartner reports that those who have not taken the necessary steps will suffer. According to a recent report on Key Issues for an Information Infrastructure Project, 2008, “ Putting in place a strategy that manages information as an enterprise asset is increasingly important for organizations of all sizes and in all vertical markets… They should adopt EIM (enterprise information management) to accelerate other business imperatives, such as operational efficiency drives… competitive differentiation initiatives… and organizational transparency mandates.”

To get moving in the right direction, any enterprise dealing with large volumes of data today must consider technology that can electronically capture structured and unstructured data; transform it to meet business process requirements; and dynamically deliver it in the right format at the right time to the right user. When that level of convergence is achieved, they will discover a powerful business enabler and competitive differentiator.

Craig Smith is Vice President, Xenos Group Inc., responsible for customer strategy and sales. Prior to Xenos he consulted with technology companies, drawing on many years experience as an executive with a major Canadian financial services firm, where he held leadership positions in both IT and business development.

For more information, please visit www.xenos.com/peg.