How efficient is the enterprise at using information? An independent report being released today from MindMetre Research, sponsored by semantic content intelligence vendor Smartlogic, offers up an Industry Information Index that benchmarked organizations in 20 industry sectors – and finds that information efficiency is fundamentally unsatisfactory.

The benchmarks considered as markers of information efficiency enterprise search effectiveness; information categorization effectiveness; and categorization and search progress and investment.  They also explored the fragmentation of information systems at responding companies. Fewer than half the 2,000 firms surveyed worldwide rated their sector as capable across the four categories, indicating issues around tasks such as systematizing documents to make them findable across the enterprise, or enabling internal users and clients to receive precisely filtered information feeds.

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Smartlogic recently released a new version of its Semaphore software, which took home the 2011 European Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Version 3.3 adds new semantically-rich features, but the company itself has been shifting its strategy to talk about its solution less as the enterprise semantic platform and more as a content intelligence platform for identifying, classifying, extracting, analyzing and utilizing hard-to-find information from among unstructured assets in existing information management systems like Microsoft SharePoint.

Why? According to marketing VP Maya Natarajan, it’s an in to better customer access. “Whenever you think of the word semantic, there’s such a small percentage of the population that understands what it is,” she says. “But amazingly the uptake for content intelligence is so great. People immediately understand that so much quicker” — that is, she says, that content intelligence describes all the business reasons and benefits for deploying an enterprise semantic platform.

Another way to make the virtues of content intelligence even more obvious: Smartlogic is planning to introduce prebuilt starter taxonomies to kickstart the process in some vertical sectors. Meanwhile, Version 3.3 has brought to its customers features that still proclaim its semantic heritage, including a semantic visualization tool.

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Executive Summary

The adage "content is king" has never been truer than it is today. Companies across the board are rapidly evolving their services to provide their customers with even more value in the face of the economic meltdown. With its near unlimited capacity and zero-cost of publishing, the Internet has grown astronomically. In 2006, it was estimated that the Internet encompassed 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites (three million times the information size of all books ever written), and is currently growing by ten thousand pages per hour. What’s particularly interesting is that it’s not just traditional publishing companies that have to find ways to compete with the explosion of information – companies ranging from pharmaceutical developers to mortgage companies are exploring ways to create new information services by tapping the immense amount of information available on the Internet today. However, creating these new information services can be extraordinarily time consuming and expensive without the help of semantic technologies.

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