Enter Big Brother’s bigger brother

Unstructured data – such as emails and telephone conversations – is hard for a company to monitor. But Big Brother is getting cleverer. By Clive Davidson

While banks are now very busy gathering and storing loss data, risk self-assessmentsand key risk indicators for operational risk management, what about all the otherdata flowing through their organisations – word processor documents, webpages, spreadsheets, telephone conversations, emails and instant messaging? Expertsestimate that this unstructured data – so called because it is not formallyorganised and categorised in databases – constitutes around 80% of theinformation in financial