A researcher at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) recently estimated that 80 percent of the information available in an average enterprise is unstructured and unavailable from any standard database management system. Take a moment to let that sink in and consider that:

• 80 percent of your information isn't available to your report writers
• Your best analysts only slice-and-dice 20 percent of the information that's available to them
• Decisions based on "the most and best data" typically only take into account one-fifth of what they should

What can you do about it? Enterprise search software appears to solve part of the problem because it incorporates unstructured documents (e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and e-mail) into the same architecture as classic reports. A simple search box brings a user to a list of information sets - a mixed bag of Word documents, database-driven reports, tagged documents from a document management system - and since they're all in there together, the information is unified. Right?

Sort of, but it can be better than that. Think about the results you normally get back from a search engine: pages of unrelated results. It would be nice if they were categorized according to people they were related to, the cost of the goods discussed, or any other way that you, as an end user, wanted them to be categorized. Better still, they could merge together into something that looks like a report, or a slice-and-dice dashboard to help with further analysis. You could find anything you want in the format you need. It can't really be that simple, can it?