Part of us, but especially females, have had a diary. The most recurring theme has to do with joys and sorrows. I too had a series of diaries, where I also wrote down activities, such as workouts, readings, but also special events. When the latter accumulated, in some cases I switched to taking them to a table, so structured data, a Google spreadsheet. Companies have various documents or unstructured data: invoices (if PDF), procedures, but mostly….communications (messages, emails, recorded calls?). If Pareto’s law holds, 80 percent of this data is concentrated in communications. But where is the value?
If I send and receive invoices through, say Aruba, I can download them in pdf or xml. But if I want to have a data dashboard of the accounting situation, as a data source I can’t put in a pdf or xml, but an excel file, .csv or google spreadsheet. I can dare to convert the pdf to excel or .csv, using Adobe for example, but it stretches the problem. I can try to create an optical character reading code for the pdf, but how quickly would the SME amortize this expense? It would also take a lot of data cleaning afterwards. It pays to review the process and use services such as Qonto, which allow transactions to be synchronized to a spreadsheet.
Getting that data through the IRS site is less expensive, data-only side, but more programming intensive, as you need to automate the login, for example, of SPID (Italian). The value here is in having the accounting pulse of the situation, since unfortunately so many companies go out of business because of negative cash flow, and in freeing up some employees’ time.
From procedures one can do process automation , and there are many approaches that lead to some decision automation. However, in 2024, I find this class of tools too immature and I have doubts about their timing to come back into spending, so I would not recommend it to SMEs.
For communications, we have two fronts: internal ones and external ones. The internal ones can be enhanced more if the statistician works with the human resources manager (preferably a psychologist). The external ones come from potential clients or customers. For potential customers, we have various sources: for example, if your site, as an e-commerce, has a whatsapp button that allows users to message you directly, these messages become valuable when, if cleaned and analyzed, they can bring up frequent questions/objections/doubts.
If, on the other hand, you sell goods or services in a way that goes through calls, video calls, there are services that allow you to record these events, complying with regulations, to summarize them, analyze them, and find, again, frequently asked questions/objections/doubts. Potentially much of the hidden value of unstructured data lies here.
Do you want to understand how to enhance, specifically, your company’s unstructured data? Or how to make it analyzable? Gather your ideas in an orderly fashion, then show them to me, via screen sharing, in a free preliminary call of about 30 minutes.