Data extraction technology helps capture and extract data from unstructured or poorly structured sources such as emails, letters, web forms and system generated electronic data.
Data extraction is important for maintaining tight governance and the ability to audit data, so you are always prepared for a compliance audit, but it also allows information to flow through easily from one person or system to another, with an improved efficiency of data-driven processes.
According to IDG, unstructured data, or ‘dark data’ is growing at a rate of 62% per year, and by 2022, it’s thought that as much as 93% of all data will be unstructured. (Shed light on your dark data before GDPR comes into force, CIO)
Unstructured data can be an untapped bank of data, analytics and information that can help drive your company forward, and can even be seen as a competitive advantage. It is also a key step towards digital transformation.
It starts by implementing a way to capture data from any source, ingest the information, structure it and then make it available for processing. With most information coming into the business through email, letters, webforms and system generated electronic data, getting a hold of this and structuring it allows your business to step towards uncovering valuable business data.
Some of the advantages of extracting this data includes prioritising processing of business-critical data, on-boarding requests and other sensitive data and responding quickly to information, which can help improve client and supplier relations.
Once your company is capturing and extracting data from previously unstructured sources, you can gain valuable insights and start to analyse the enterprise data coming into the company.
Not only does this give you more data to work with, it allows you to start thinking about the processes in place and actually start to extract the data in order to make business decisions and in the whole scheme of things, allows for faster decision making.
With the use of cognitive document automation that goes beyond scanning and capture, data extraction is just an enabler and a starting point for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (Ai), which allows you to further automate process saving time and money.
Data extraction is ultimately the first step towards uncovering enterprise data that was previously unstructured or dark data, but the follow-on steps towards digital transformation is where the real benefits start to come in.