IBM rolled out a new tool today that links enterprise search capabilities to traditional business intelligence (BI) reporting and analysis of data in databases.

The IBM WebSphere Content Discovery for Business Intelligence tool is designed to bridge the traditional limitations of both enterprise search and BI tools, according to the company. While enterprise search tools typically do not provide direct access to BI data, BI tools usually can't tap into unstructured data such as Web pages and text-based documents -- including call center notes, warranty claims and product sheets, said Marc Andrews, IBM's program director information management strategy.

"Typically, a user doesn't want to go to two different environments to find the unstructured documents and the BI information," he said. "We've created this looped process where you can go back and forth between using unstructured information to create new reports ... and being able to search on those reports you have created."

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Inc. has used the tool in a pilot project to access unstructured data in call center workers' notes about the company's interaction with health care providers such as hospitals. The tool also allows the insurance company to crawl external Web sites to find relevant data about providers, such as plans to build new facilities, said Frank Brooks, senior manager of data resource management and chief data architect at the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based company. The unstructured information is then combined with structured data from relational databases to build a single view of a provider that BlueCross uses when negotiating rates with the provider, he said.

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Prashanth Rai