Last week I attended and gave a talk at Salon BI in Montreal.  Although there were many good presentations, one that I really enjoyed was Jean-Paul Isson’s presentation (he’ll be speaking at TDWI next month).  Jean-Paul Isson, Global VP of BI and Predictive Analytics for Monster discussed the evolution of Monster’s homegrown text analytics solution that matches employers and job seekers based on contextual analysis.  His session highlighted the fact that although text analytics may not be broadly applied within organizations, analyzing text in addition to traditional data analysis is becoming one of the key ways to fully understand the customer.  The general elusiveness of advanced text analytics in many organizations leads to questions about whether businesses are actually using advanced BI applications within their companies, as text analytics and incorporating unstructured data analysis into the overall BI infrastructure should be a logical next step to the overall use of BI. However, one of Isson’s main points that cannot be overlooked is the importance of taking baby steps with any BI implementation.  Hopefully this means that companies are on their way to including text as part of their overall analytics as they move from step to step and adopt more advanced BI applications.