You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.
This phrase summarises the challenges and opportunities facing organisations in the digital era. The opportunity lies in better insights and business intelligence. Yet, there are a few challenges: data volumes and classification, information silos, governance and regulation – inhibiting businesses trying to hone their competitive edge with information.
Cloud systems and artificial intelligence are piling even more pressure. But information management platforms can provide the answers.
"An information management platform manages your information, storing it securely and making it available to authorised stakeholders," says Subin Kesavan, OpenText's Business Value Engineer for EMEA Emerging Markets. "It's not a new concept. But newer innovations such as platforms and using AI for automation and decision-making have raised information management's profile as a crucial service for modern companies."
Intelligent document processing
Kesavan points out several popular use cases: IT service management, sharing information across business and supply chain networks, logistics management, channelling data from IOT sensor devices, cyber security and fashionable new developments such as generative AI. These examples all involve data and information that users can access easily and securely.
But in the federated technology world, information is scattered across multiple systems, hidden behind silos, in databases and as unstructured and unclassified data. Organisations must find, classify and process data and then direct it to the appropriate applications or employees – a demanding prospect.
"Imagine cleaning a garage overflowing with items. Eventually, you may lose your motivation and experience a sense of overwhelm. But finding information for a business is more consequential because there are real consequences."
Information management platforms such as OpenText have developed systems to address different data and information challenges. For example, they utilise intelligent document processing, a sophisticated discovery and classification process.
"Think of information coming in as invoices or contracts. Somebody has to manually understand and classify documents, which is very labour intensive. If they have to do it with large stockpiles of documentation, the project could take months, even years. But with automation, we can intelligently understand what those pieces of documents are and extract the information to run leading application processes. This is almost our bread and butter – classifying information that's coming in, extracting relevant metadata and using that metadata to drive business processes."
The platform leverages AI in multiple ways. It feeds a business process automation layer which, enhanced by an AI-driven rules engine, automates approvals where possible, minimising manual intervention. An AI-informed archival process ensures policy compliance.
Empowering generative AI
Organisations want to get a handle on their paperwork, streamlining and automating many of the relevant processes. Generative AI creates more opportunity to dive into business information. Combining a technology called retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to make generative AI features that are easy to use and reliable is giving information management a clear edge in this area.
"Our system uses RAG to dig into large amounts of curated data, such as reports, contracts and customer files, pulling out exactly what's relevant. If you need a quick summary of a project status or an answer to a tricky question, our AI doesn't guess. Using RAG, we look into a database of information, analysing the most relevant documents and serving up concise, context-rich insights. It points you back to the source so that you can double-check and make sure that the details are current and right," says Kesavan.
The information management platform provides the guardrails to use generative AI securely and reliably, including the ability to block unauthorised users from accessing information and data leakage.
"We put a wrapper around generative AI so that it integrates very tightly with our solutions. Our customers don't have to go through the complexity of multiple contracts. We include all that in a single contract so they can immediately benefit from our solution without risking vendor lock-in."
It also serves as a unifier between different AI models and cloud providers: "It can be your private cloud and multiple cloud environments as well. Maybe a customer is using AWS for a customer-facing application. They might be using Microsoft Azure for their Active Directory integration for user authentication and GCP to use advanced models like Gemini. We can integrate and make all that visible through a single, unified platform where we can take care of the document management or the centralised management layer and plug into the different data sources as needed."
Using AI to overcome information challenges
Information management provides a conclusive way to overcome data barriers, offer automation, manage compliance and security, and direct information where it's needed, from business processes and predictive analytics to information retrieval powered by generative AI.
"At the end of the day, it's all about empowering enterprises to innovate faster, reduce costs and respond with greater agility. So that's what we do."
Read more about AI for business here.
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