Insight Engines speed up search, scale up insight, and secure information – how to choose the best from the rest.

Find out how to discover and unlock the immense value stored in your data to steer insightful business decisions and unleash your competitive edge. And learn how to control your data’s visibility, accessibility, and security to stay compliant and risk-free.

What are Insight Engines?

Insight Engines are a rapidly evolving technology which allow organisations to unlock new value from their corporate data. Insight Engines use AI and Machine Learning to describe, discover, organise and analyse data across an organisation's entire ecosystem. Insight Engines can then deliver this synthesised information (insight!) proactively or interactively to digital workers or customers, at the moment they need it, to help them get the answers they need and do their jobs.

Data, information, and insight, powering your enterprise

Data is swamping your systems and snowballing your networks. Its growth is exponential – and its benefits can be too. As your organisations and teams grow, so does your data and information. Gartner predicts that, by 2023, there’ll be 1.14 billion knowledge workers worldwide, all in need of insight to power their productivity and help them do more with the information they have.

Although it’s simple enough for organisations to collect masses of information, keeping it in check and on track is a whole different ball game. Left untapped, what’s the worst that can happen? Let’s check out some key stats...

According to a recent Gartner survey, 44% of users claimed to have made a wrong decision simply because they were unaware of data they already owned – data that could have informed a wiser move. From our own analysis, we’ve found that unclear labelling and siloed systems cause 75% of documents to stay dormant since their creation, often leading to replications further along the line. Plus, on average, a whopping 90% of data and information that employees search for is obstructed by inflexible access permissions. So even when you are aware of your data assets, obstacles to access can hugely impede your work processes and operations.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 44% of users claimed to have made a wrong decision simply because they were unaware of data they already owned.

Added to this is the ever-present danger of ‘dark data'. Although your organisation constantly collects, processes, and stores vast piles of information throughout everyday business operations, if it’s not correctly enriched, classified, and readily available, this ‘dark data’ stays hidden, gathering dust at great expense – and deriving no real value for your business. In fact, 50% of enterprise information is ‘dark’, and it’s those hidden, forgotten about places that are often the riskiest. The danger here lurks in not knowing what you own, so you can’t secure it.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. Keeping your information assets in check and your data on track can be simple enough if you know how. Knowing exactly what you own, where it lives, and how to access it. This mammoth task is beyond the line of human duty, which is why you need to put the right information technology firmly in place. And that’s exactly why powerful data-driven platforms – aptly named Insight Engines – recently rolled onto the scene to help organisations, like yours, discover, enrich, and store their constant flow of structured and unstructured data.

Insight Engines speed up and personalise your information searches

Making their entrance on Gartner’s infamous Magic Quadrant, Insight Engines are powered by machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. Equipped with the tools to conduct advanced crawls, create rich indexes, and perform complex search queries, Insight Engines will describe, discover, organise, and analyse the vast amounts of data and information stored across your enterprise.

Insight Engines will describe, discover, organise, and analyse the vast amounts of data and information stored across your enterprise.

Regardless of format (structured, unstructured, or semi-structured) or storage system (internal, external, cloud, or on-premises), Insight Engines will connect the dots between your data, discovering, enriching, and contextualising to deliver one consistent and instantly shareable version of the truth to all users at the same time.

Nothing gets missed, so you’re safe in the knowledge that none of your data is left lurking in the dark. Now all your data has been discovered and enriched, it’s possible to ensure that it’s safe, secure, and kept in its rightful place where the right users can access it. And it can be put to work, with technology that extracts meaningful business value from the information assets you’ve amassed throughout your digital age.

Plus, rather than limiting your employees to on-demand searches, Insight Engines go one step further to proactively put relevant and insightful data directly into the right hands at the right time. Not just data experts, but across your entire workforce, so all your employees can easily find the data they need. Advanced machine learning algorithms continuously track and learn from user behaviour to produce these personalised predictions, making it easier than ever to find the information you need, exactly when you need it. This cuts time spent searching and reduces replications.

By making the most of all your valuable data assets, you can now make more insightful decisions for positive business outcomes. Insight Engines deliver true whole-enterprise information management.

Insight Engines scale up your insight and unlock data-driven value – choose wisely

The basic premise of an Insight Engine is to put you back in control of your organisation’s information, enabling you to steer decisions derived from the unrealised data assets you already own. But are all Insight Engines created equally?

When it comes to choosing the right Insight Engine for your business, it’s important to identify where your biggest challenges and opportunities are, and how well your potential new platform addresses these. Make the right choice, and you’ll have a solution to more than one of your biggest business challenges.

When checking out the options, there’s a few questions to keep in mind –

• How easily does the Insight Engine connect to all your source systems, whether they’re on-premise or in the cloud, and how does it enrich your mountains of structured and unstructured information?
• Can the product connect to the sources that matter most to you – from SharePoint, Salesforce, and Outlook, to industry-specific sources, like construction management software?
• Does the Insight Engine come readily equipped with business-focused solutions, like tools to support your compliance teams in processing DSARs and requests?
• How easy is the platform for your business users to get up-to-speed with? Is the User Interface intuitive? Are there any options for alternative search formats, like voice search, or smart visualisation of results?
• What security measures does it offer to keep your information – and your business – safe?

“Organisations are looking for new, better ways to become data-driven and take control of their information. Insight Engines offer a powerful solution to the challenge of discovering relevant interconnected data – and getting instant actionable insights precisely at the moment you need them. There’s huge potential in every organisation’s information, and an Insight Engine unlocks this.” Steve Salvin, Chief Exec

At Aiimi, we decided to design and develop our Aiimi Insight Engine to do everything an Insight Engine does – like interconnecting, enriching, and making information discoverable – and equip you with in-built solutions designed to address your biggest business information challenges, including request management, migration, compliance, legacy decommissioning, and more.

The Aiimi Insight Engine enables you to leave your data wherever it lives and constructs a data mesh layer on top of it all, interconnecting everything – so you can reveal valuable relationships between data and information, and discover the information you need at speed. Simple yet highly effective. Take a look at this short animation to see just how it works:

Insight Engines secure your data with permissions tracking at scale

One of the most important considerations for any new solution – especially one that’s as powerful as an Insight Engine – is security. Delivering one consistent and instantly shareable version of the truth to all users across your entire enterprise needs to be tempered by customised access permissions to keep your data secure. Afterall, although Insight Engines enable everyone to see what’s available, not everyone needs to access everything all the time.

Crucially, the Aiimi Insight Engine integrates with your own corporate security protocols like multi-factor authentication and single sign-on via an authentication gateway, so your users see only what they’re authorised to see – and all your search results inherit the security profile of their source system. This means that you can boost visibility across your teams while safeguarding private sensitive information from prying eyes. It also means that you can prevent it from ending up in the wrong hands due to insider threat and cybersecurity risks.

Insight Engines take the pain out of privacy and cut the costs of compliance

Added to the challenge of access permissions is the influx of Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs), which are heaping pressure on your human resource and compliance teams. By 2023, 65% of the global population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations. With extensive requirements in data discovery, redaction, and disclosure, compliance and request management processes are a challenge in real need of technology and automation. One of Aiimi’s current customers conducts 70 DSARs every month. Until they automated their DSAR processes with our Insight Engine’s Data Privacy & Compliance solution, processing each request cost around £5,000, mounting to annual costs of more than £4 million.

Purpose-built, user friendly tools for automating data discovery, redaction, and disclosure are a key consideration when choosing your Insight Engine. Auto-classification of files, highlighting personal data or PII entities within documents, redaction capability, and automated document risk profiling are all vital features to look for if data privacy and compliance is high on your list of business priorities.

Insight Engines supply data-driven value for your business in our digital age

Gartner, who first coined the term Insight Engine, predicts that 50% of analytical queries will be generated by search, natural language processing, voice, or automation – and 35% of the world’s knowledge workers (all 1.14 billion of them) will be using an Insight Engine to power their productivity by 2023. So, investing in an Insight Engine to help your business realise the true value of all your data and information has never been timelier.

So, here’s a handy recap of the top 10 benefits of embracing the Aiimi Insight Engine for your business.

1. Data is valuable – unlock all of it
2. One source of truth – accessible to all
3. Relevant results – instant answers
4. Anticipate actions and recommend content – speedier search
5. Actionable and timely insights – knowledge is power
6. Steer decision-making – outpace competitors
7. Streamline operations – secure speed to market
8. Data-driven transformation – fuel business growth
9. Automate processes and audits – fast and compliant
10. Safeguard from insider threats and cyberattacks – secure and risk free

Now you know exactly how an Insight Engine will speed up your search, scale up your insight, and secure your data and information, be sure to book in your one-on-one Aiimi Insight Engine demo with a consultant today.