At the EMC Writer's Conference last Friday in New York City, Fern Halper, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates and an expert on data analysis, gave a presentation on text analytics. She said that while content management systems provide a way to publish and organize information, they are not really built to find patterns in that data. For that, she explained you need to buy text analytics software.

She defines text analytics as follows: "The automated process of analyzing unstructured text, extracting relevant information and transforming that into structured information that can be leveraged in different ways." The software, she explained, enables you to cull through vast amounts of information and extract data from it to be used for analysis. One way is to find patterns to better understand your customers.

She used the example of a fictional phone company called GlobalTel. She said, suppose GlobalTel's competitors are offering an aggressively priced family plan and customer service is getting calls about this. How, as a marketing team, are you to know this? It could constitute 10 percent of calls and be a part of a mountain of notes from customer service operations spread out geographically all over the world. If GlobalTel had the technology to parse through the sentences, pull out key words and phrases and see that people are asking about this calling plan, they could start to see pattern emerging and could do something about it. What's more, it can be used to analyze information both inside and outside the firewall, so companies could use it to find patterns on social networks, for example.

Although Halper is careful to point out that Text Analytics software is far from perfect,  it can be very powerful and can be used for other purposes such as competitive analysis, fraud detection, eDiscovery, quality early-warning systems or any data analysis task.

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