Five Best Practices for Text Analytics

It’s been a while since I updated my blog and a lot has changed.  In January, I made the move to TDWI as Research Director for Advanced Analytics.  I’m excited to be there, although I miss Hurwitz & Associates.   One of the last projects I worked on while at Hurwitz & Associates was the Victory Index for Text Analytics.  Click here for more information on the Victory Index.  

As part of my research for the Victory Index, I spent I a lot of time talking to companies about how they’re using text analytics.  By far, one of the biggest use cases for text analytics centers on understanding customer feedback and behavior.  Some companies are using internal data such as call center notes or emails or survey verbatim to gather feedback and understand behavior, others are using social media, and still others are using both.  

What are these end users saying about how to be successful with text analytics?  Aside from the important best practices around defining the right problem, getting the right people, and dealing with infrastructure issues, I’ve also heard the following:

Best Practice #1 – Managing expectations among senior leadership.   A number of the end-users I speak with say that their management often thinks that text analytics will work almost out of the box and this can establish unrealistic expectations. Some of these executives seem to envision a big funnel where reams of unstructured text enter and concepts, themes, entities, and insights pop out at the other end.  Managing expectations is a balancing act.  On the one hand, executive management may not want to hear the details about how long it is going to take you to build a taxonomy or integrate data.  On the other hand, it is important to get wins under your belt quickly to establish credibility in the technology because no one wants to wait years to see some results.  That said, it is still important to establish a reasonable set of goals and prioritize them and to communicate them to everyone.  End users find that getting senior management involved and keeping them informed with well-defined plans on a realistic first project can be very helpful in handling expectations. 

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