Life Science Companies can Leverage Unstructured Data

The processing of unstructured data, from inside and outside the enterprise, using sentiment analysis is an important new frontier in data utilization for pharmaceutical companies.

At least since the end of World War II and the advent and widespread use of computers, life science companies have been able enter, process, and interpret rows and columns of data. For decision-making purposes, the Vice-President for R&D could leverage data on how many pills per day a factory produced, or the Vice-President of Business Development could interpret data on expenditures for physician outreach and the ROI.  The growth of highly scalable cloud based capabilities is now substantially increasing the ability to process and interpret massive amounts of data.  As has been well documented, this growth in computing capacity is so significant as to constitute both a quantitative and a qualitative environmental change, with significant implications for strategy and operations.

There is another, less emphasized but no less important, growth in computing capability involving unstructured data.  In the latest issue of Sloan Management Review, K. Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer of Tata Consultancy Services, provides thoughtful commentary on this development.  Unstructured data can be sourced internally (e.g., in-house blogs; internally knowledge markets) or externally (e.g., SMS messaging habits; various kinds of networking).  It can be in audio, video, or text format.  It contains significant valuable information and can help drive business analytics...