Digital Transformation is more than a catchphrase – we believe it’s a business imperative and the key to business success. Trends analyst Altimeter defines digital transformation as “the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touch point in the customer experience lifecycle.” Success in a digital age requires new technologies, new strategies, and a new psychology that embraces both aspects.
To find out how IBM’s Watson Explorer helps customers achieve Digital Transformation, we interviewed subject matter expert Christine Livingston, a Senior Project Manager from our Enterprise Content Intelligence business unit. Christine leads Perficient’s Advanced Case Management and Content Analytics practices, working in collaboration with IBM to develop industry leading solutions that incorporate case management, information life cycle governance, content management and process management technologies. She has presented on webinars and at a variety of conferences on similar topics. Most recently, Christine presented on Watson healthcare solutions for content analytics in a webinar earlier this year.
What is the primary challenge customers are seeing with unstructured data/content analysis that is hindering growth?
Customers are capturing more and more information every day, and are struggling with managing, finding, and understanding the massive amounts of data and content within their organization. Unstructured content is exceptionally challenging to harness. It is inherently difficult to classify and organize unstructured content, which in turn makes it difficult to efficiently locate and learn from this content.
How are they leveraging Watson Explorer to address this issue?
Watson Explorer provides a platform to consolidate data and content from many different sources into a single, 360-degree view. This approach allows employees and customers to quickly find information, in context, and act upon it. Watson Explorer’s Analytical Components are uniquely capable of providing insights into unstructured content by “reading” the content and facilitating exploration of unstructured content without a user having to locate and read through massive amounts of information.
How do you see Watson Explorer enabling Digital Transformation?
Watson Explorer allows organizations to deliver content and data in a contextually relevant, unified view. Organizations can analyze unstructured content to extract meaningful facts, entities, relationships, and concepts that were buried within content and previously required human interaction to understand and manage. Watson Explorer allows companies to move into the era of cognitive computing by enabling users to ask natural language questions and scale applications to new levels that were previously limited by manpower resources.
How can Watson Explorer help with Business Optimization or enable Digital Experience?
Watson Explorer delivers cognitive exploration primarily in the following ways:
- Explore information in a single, unified view with secure access to ALL of the organization’s content and data. Create 360-degree information applications for a complete, contextually relevant view of any topic combining both content and analytics.
- Analyze content using superior natural language processing techniques to extract meaningful facts, entities, relationships, concepts and sentiment, and to visualize the information to expose its meaning.
- Advise users by enabling them to ask natural language questions via applications that leverage the cognitive services of the IBM Watson platform.
How are companies using the technology to gain a competitive advantage?
Companies are using this technology in a huge variety of applications. Watson Explorer can be used in customer service applications to analyze social media, call center information, emails, etc. and gain insight into how customers perceive an organization, why current trends are occurring, and how to foster successful customer service relationships. Applications are as broad as early quality warning in automotive, diagnoses in healthcare, improvements in research and development, and optimization in manufacturing.
For example, we recently started working with a unified health system in the Midwest to implement Watson Explorer to capture doctor, nurse and social worker notes and make these notes available for patient-based analytics. Perficient had previously implemented a set of SPSS predictive models for this health system, and is looking to enhance these models with the content captured by Watson Explorer.
Organizations that solve these information challenges make better decisions leveraging ALL available data, experience increased revenue, improved productivity, reduced costs and better customer loyalty – and that’s the value that WEX brings.
