What is unstructured data?

A working definition from MIT Sloan

unstructured data (noun)

Information such as text, pictures, videos, or social media, that does not follow a conventional data model.

Traditional analytics methods are effective in deriving decision-making value from structured data — that is, data that can be organized by rows and columns. But until now, companies have struggled to get value from unstructured data — images, audio, video, natural language, and more — without a lot of labor-intensive preprocessing. It’s a task that is much on business leaders’ minds: According to analytics management firm Komprise, 87% of IT leaders surveyed in 2022 said managing unstructured data growth is a top priority, up from 70% the year previous.

Enter deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that uses neural networks to mimic the learning process of the human brain. With deep learning, unstructured data’s limitations are “effectively gone,” said Rama Ramakrishnan, professor of the practice at MIT Sloan. “We can now leverage unstructured and structured data together in a single, flexible, and powerful framework and achieve significant gains relative to what we could do earlier,” Ramakrishnan said. “This is possibly the most significant analytics breakthrough that I have witnessed in my professional career.”

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Working Definitions: Analytics

MIT Sloan's Working Definitions explore the words and phrases behind emerging management ideas.
 

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