The Pain:

Transforming unstructured data into actionable information is a pain point for individuals, corporations and government agencies today. They are awash in a perfect storm of data and don’t know what they don’t know. The current generation of data analysis tools add bias to the information, and don’t allow data to speak for itself. It is cumbersome and time-consuming to use today’s tools to surface and discover unknowns, anomalies, trends, patterns and connections in this tsunami of unstructured data.  

The biggest fear for analysts today is missing intelligence. The case of 9/11 is a constant reminder. All the data was there to know that something was going to happen, if not exactly what was going to happen. This is not a problem limited to the intelligence community, but the consequences of missing intelligence in that world can be much more severe.
— Former Analyst

Economic turmoil is an on-going fact of business life. Missed information about a credit crisis, derogatory information about a company’s products or any other host of trends can have massive implications. The ramifications are significant if analysts miss or are delayed in processing information.

The need is real and critical. We need answers. The answers are there in the form of networks and relationships of ideas, individuals and organizations and the inherent relationship between ideas and actions. But these answers are buried in the data smog of the Web, corporate Intranets, email logs, phone archives, RSS feeds, analysts reports and file servers, a data smog of unstructured data. This is the digital domain of the unknown unknowns. We do not have the luxury of time to understand it.

Too much data — too many sources. Which did I already check, and did I think to put in all the right queries without opening up the aperture so much that I’m going to be buried in data? What did I miss? And what didn’t I know to look for? The nagging fear in the back of every analyst’s mind is “What didn’t I know to look for?” Nothing — but nothing — is as important as finding the unknown unknowns in the first place.
— Analyst consultant

A major problem facing analysts across the board, regardless of their mission or industry, is the “rotating chair” syndrome. In the past, have would have four or five systems completely independent and running on different computers to do their analysis. They would literally have to swivel their chair to see the different computers to run similar queries, view different systems and enter date multiple times to get it into the different systems. Hardware evolution has liminated the literal swiveling from computer to computer, but analysts are still handicapped by having to use multiple programs that do not integrate and cannot share data or ideas.

Conventional search engines aren’t much help if you don’t know what you’re looking for, or if you’re interested in the composition of a communications network that has organized around a particular topic. Present search and discovery technology can’t tell you who is talking to whom and who the key influencers are in that network.

The Remedy:

iQuest Analytics, Inc. (iQuest) is a software company that has developed algorithmic-based software that uses a hybrid blend of search technologies, grammatical and network analysis and the principles of social psychology to analyze unstructured data to show who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations are taking place.

iQuest) is a single systems that performs the entire analytical lifecycle on data and gives a single-point view. iQuest can also be easily integrated with other analytical solutions to augment capabilities in a new and more informative way. iQuest can be used at any point in the analysis lifecycle to better facilitate discovery for the analyst.

iQuest gives analysts visibility into the unknown unknowns — all those relationships and social networks that they may never suspect or think to look for via all the other tools at their disposal. Its algorithms offer a truly unbiased view into the data streams — answering the nagging fear in the back of every analyst’s mind: “What didn’t I know to look for?”

iQuest paints a graphic picture in real time of the relationships of people, ideas and organizations. It provides one-click analysis of complex facts and relationships that previously were extremely expensive and time-consuming to obtain. It surfaces the unknown unknowns and unearths thoughts and actions and how they are connected. Moreover, it gives analysts the ability to get a very quick understanding of the core concepts contained in a large data set with minimal manual interaction with the data. Analysts can see over time how concepts and identities become important, los importance or maintain their status in a network over time.

iQuest discovers predictive patterns by looking at people, their ideas and their relationships and inferring behavior. iQuest creates value by giving users the ability to draw on those inferences in developing strategy and tactics.

iQuest is the antidote to the pain of transforming unstructured data into actionable information.