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Situation
The ability to rapidly capitalize on the enormous amount of information that flows through an organization each day, in order to clarify issues or make strategic decisions, is now a strong competitive edge for companies.
Solution
LexiQuest Mine, as part of the "Strateasy" business intelligence information system of France Telecom, facilitates the analysis of information and accelerates its strategic use. The Strateasy offering resulted from the experience that France Telecom has gained since 1997 in the establishment of an information system devoted to gaining business intelligence.
Initially designed for the group's internal requirements, this business intelligence portal is now being made available to other companies.
The Strateasy offering makes it possible to:
- Acquire information in various formats and from various sources, including external sources such as the Internet, market research, the trade press, and third–party databases, as well as internal content such as new recruit surveys, reports, and summaries
- Automate the gathering and updating of information
- Classify information in monitoring plans adapted to the needs of the company
- Distribute information in a targeted way to users
- Be alerted to opportunities for development and competitive risks
This global solution, which is based on the exchange of experience, includes consulting services (analysis of needs, site parameterisation, and change management), secure hosting of a dedicated portal for each company, application maintenance as a function of evolving needs and technologies, and after–sales service.
The Strateasy platform now includes approximately 500,000 unstructured (text) documents or semi–structured documents (with metadata), which are accessed by several thousands of users which, in addition to internal users, include users from major companies that are leaders in their respective markets.
Results
Strateasy enables companies to harness the strategic information relating to their customers, markets, or competitors. This solution brings together the most relevant capabilities for our clients on a secure and integrated platform. LexiQuest Mine provides its users with all the power and linguistic quality required to carry out effective and rapid monitoring.
Gil Debret
Director of the Business Intelligence Division
France Telecom
Fast detection of weak signals
Strateasy is designed to meet the information needs of its users. Previously, users had to spend a great deal of time searching for relevant information and trying to understand its correlations. "The main difficulty did not relate to finding the correlations that occur most frequently, since they are readily identifiable, but rather to finding the weak signals. This specific need prompted us to turn to LexiQuest Mine, which is the best tool for quickly identifying weak signals. That is still what gives it its major added value," says Gil Debret, director of the Business Intelligence Division.
Within Strateasy, LexiQuest Mine interfaces transparently with other software solutions in the market, such as the Verity K2 search tool.
The three main roles of LexiQuest Mine
LexiQuest Mine acts as a linguistic extractor. Based on a sophisticated processor, it recognizes the language of documents, and extracts not only the thematic concepts but also the proper names of places and products. LexiQuest Mine is a dynamic tool which represents the identified concepts and their interactions in a color–coded, graphical map. For the user, this visual presentation is much more practical to work with than a linear list of concepts.
LexiQuest Mine also provides valuable help with the creation of classification plans.
Reduced analysis times
In the context of strategic monitoring, France Telecom cites several examples in which the time needed to identify the representative terms of a corpus has been cut by half. This represents a clear productivity gain, which on the one hand frees up more time to analyze and summarize the acquired information, and on the other hand raises the responsiveness to increasingly specialized organizational demands.
From a technological point of view, "Integrating LexiQuest Mine into the Strateasy platform was easy and straightforward, thanks in particular to its APIs, but also to technological choices which are consistent with ours," adds Gil Debret.
Mention should also be made of LexiQuest Mine's growing ability to identify different concepts, whatever the corpus, thanks to the constant enrichment of its dictionaries.
High added–value in a strategic environment
LexiQuest Mine shows its full potential in a strategic monitoring environment. Information managers use it in a very specialized way to meet major challenges. For example, France Telecom used the capabilities of LexiQuest Mine to prepare the launch of a new product offering. "The mapping of concepts, and the graphs of their evolution over time, were used to evaluate the communication of our competitors. This research enabled us to clarify the issues and give managers greater visibility on the possible directions to take," explains Magali Chambon, consultant in the Business Intelligence Division.
"Our co–operation with France Telecom is based on many years of mutual trust," says Olivier Jouve, vice president Text Mining at SPSS. "LexiQuest Mine brings a new linguistic dimension to Strateasy. We can now give meaning to metadata and personalize key concepts."
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