Business Insights Workbench

Business Insights Workbench (BIW), a solution offered by the IBM Almaden Research Center, provides integrated structured and unstructured information mining. BIW embeds a suite of information analytics and data processing technologies to improve the caliber of decision making for enterprises.

Unlike traditional information analytics approaches that focus on mining either unstructured or structured information, BIW brings together the worlds of structured and unstructured data in a single analytics platform and utilizes both types of information to discover significant business insights that could not otherwise have been obtained. For example, trends in numeric data can reveal a slowdown in sales in a particular region during a certain time period. Analysis of related documents, such as customer complaints and product reviews, can help determine the cause of the slowdown. The approach used for this is to extend an OLAP model enhanced with text analysis. The key differentiators of BIW technologies from existing known technologies includes the following:

• Combining dimensional data warehousing technologies, text indexing and search techniques to enable flexible, scalable, and adaptive analytical rendering of information.
• Combining text mining and structured data mining techniques to expand the scope and depth of discovered business insights.
• Coupling a wide range of visualization and graphics techniques (as shown below) with information analytics to allow users to examine data and analytics results in different views, thereby revealing hidden patterns.

BIW Visualization and Analytics

The following figure shows the BIW architecture. BIW works with a wide range of data sources, integrating with and leveraging IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition to collect, parse, categorize and index structured and unstructured data. BIW also uses the IBM Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) toolkit to extract concepts, facts, and relationships from text, which helps organizations get more insight and value from enterprise content assets.

BIW also integrates with IBM's Web Fountain Semantic Super Computer for crawling, searching, and indexing capabilities. BIW contains an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) engine to process structured and unstructured data and convert it into a data warehouse. The BIW analytics engine works on top of the data warehouse in order to combine structured and unstructured information analytics.

Business Insights Workbench Architecture

BIW has successfully addressed a wide range of business issues in different industries, including finance, healthcare and life sciences (HCLS), customer relationship management (CRM), and intellectual property (IP). BIW has been particularly successful in the following application domains:

• IP analytics
• CRM analytics
• Healthcare and life sciences analytics

The following figure shows some examples of analysis that BIW performs in each of the above spaces.

BIW Solutions

In addition to developing cutting-edge analytics technologies, BIW has also evolved from a monolithic application into a next generation information analytics architecture based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA allows for efficient and effective componentization and solution. We envision that componentizing a wide range of information analytics capabilities, such as those embedded in BIW, and enabling users to quickly compose simplified analytics solutions by selecting the desired analytics components and data sources from a rich set, will ensure simplicity, flexibility, reusability, and scalability for end users.

IBM's Business Information Services on a Network (BISON) is designed to achieve the above goals. BISON is a business information analytics services platform that combines business information analytics and SOA to offer on-demand information analytics services that meet a wide range of business needs. In addition, recognizing that today's enterprises are increasingly dependent upon continuous, diverse, collaborative and interactive intelligence, BISON will allow users to tag and share knowledge by incorporating user knowledge and the analytics results as forms of "knowledge" in the data warehouse. Hence, in BISON, the traditional data warehouse is no longer simply a static data store. Instead it becomes a dynamic and growing knowledge base that supports on-going learning and business optimization.

Overall, the journey that BIW team has been taken over the past few years has evolved from text analytics to integrated text and data analytics and SOA-based analytics, as shown below. This web site presents information about earlier, related technologies such as eClassifier, current and mature technologies such as BIW and its applications, and next generation technologies, most of which are embedded in the BISON project.

For future information about BIW and BISON, please see the contact page.

BIW Technology Evolution