Two Big Data Resources Worth Exploring

It’s a good day.  Our new book, Big Data for Dummies, is being released today and I’m busy working on a Big Data Analytics maturity model at TDWI with Krish Krishnan.  Krish, a faculty member at TDWI, is actually presenting some of the model at the TDWI World Conference:  Big Data Tipping Point taking place during the first week of May (see sidebar).  I would encourage people to attend, even if you aren’t that far along in your big data deployments.  TDWI has terrific courses in all aspects of information management and we understand that most companies will need to leverage their existing infrastructure to support big data initiatives.  In fact the title of this World conference is, “Preparing for the Practical Realities of Big Data.”   Check it out.

Back to the book.  Here’s a look at the Introduction!  Enjoy!

 

Two Weeks and Counting to Big Data for Dummies

I am excited to announce I’m a co-author of Big Data for Dummies which will be released in mid-April 2013.  Here’s the synopsis from Wiley:

Find the right big data solution for your business or organization

Big data management is one of the major challenges facing business, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weather patterns monitored by meteorologists, or social network activity can quickly outpace the capacity of traditional data management tools. If you need to develop or manage big data solutions, you’ll appreciate how these four experts define, explain, and guide you through this new and often confusing concept. You’ll learn what it is, why it matters, and how to choose and implement solutions that work.

• Effectively managing big data is an issue of growing importance to businesses, not-for-profit organizations, government, and IT professionals
• Authors are experts in information management, big data, and a variety of solutions
• Explains big data in detail and discusses how to select and implement a solution, security concerns to consider, data storage and presentation issues, analytics, and much more
• Provides essential information in a no-nonsense, easy-to-understand style that is empowering

 

Big Data For Dummies cuts through the confusion and helps you take charge of big data solutions for your organization.

Five Challenges for Text Analytics

While text analytics is considered a “must have” technology by the majority of companies that use it, challenges abound.  So I’ve learned from the many companies I’ve talked to as I prepare Hurwitz & Associates’ Victory Index for Text Analytics,a tool that assesses not just the technical capability of the technology but its ability to provide tangible value to the business (look for the results of the Victory Index in about a month). Here are the top five: http://bit.ly/Tuk8DB.  Interestingly, most of them have nothing to do with the technology itself.

Are you ready for IBM Watson?

This week marks the one year anniversary of the IBM Watson computer system succeeding at Jeopardy!. Since then, IBM has gotten a lot of interest in Watson.  Companies want one of those.

But what exactly is Watson and what makes it unique?  What does it mean to have a Watson?  And, how is commercial Watson different from Jeopardy Watson?

What is Watson and why is it unique?

Watson is a new class of analytic solution

Watson is a set of technologies that processes and analyzes massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data in a unique way.   One statistic given at the recent IOD conference is that Watson can process and analyze information from 200 million books in three seconds.  While Watson is very advanced it uses technologies that are commercially available with some “secret sauce” technologies that IBM Research has either enhanced or developed.  It combines software technologies from big data, content and predictive analytics, and industry specific software to make it work.

Watson includes several core pieces of technology that make it unique

So what is this secret sauce?  Watson understands natural language, generates and evaluates hypotheses, and adapts and learns.

First, Watson uses Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a very broad and complex field, which has developed over the last ten to twenty years. The goals of NLP are to derive meaning from text. NLP generally makes use of linguistic concepts such as grammatical structures and parts of speech.  It breaks apart sentences and extracts information such as entities, concepts, and relationships.  IBM is using a set of annotators to extract information like symptoms, age, location, and so on.

So, NLP by itself is not new, however, Watson is processing vast amounts of this unstructured data quickly, using an architecture designed for this.

Second, Watson works by generating hypotheses which are potential answers to a question.  It is trained by feeding question and answer (Q/A) data into the system. In other words, it is shown representative questions and learns from the supplied answers.  This is called evidence based learning.  The goal is to generate a model that can produce a confidence score (think logistic regression with a bunch of attributes).  Watson would start with a generic statistical model and then look at the first Q/A and use that to tweak coefficients. As it gains more evidence it continues to tweak the coefficients until it can “say” confidence is high.  Training Watson is key since what is really happening is that the trainers are building statistical models that are scored.  At the end of the training, Watson has a system that has feature vectors and models so that eventually it can use the model to probabilistically score the answers.   The key here is something that Jeopardy! did not showcase – which is that it is not deterministic (i.e. using rules).  Watson is probabilistic and that makes it dynamic.

When Watson generates a hypothesis it then scores the hypothesis based on the evidence.   Its goal is to get the right answer for the right reason.  (So, theoretically, if there are 5 symptoms that must be positive for a certain disease and 4 that must be negative and Watson only has 4 of the 9 pieces of information, it could ask for more.) The hypothesis with the highest score is presented.   By the end the analysis, Watson is confident when it knows the answer and when it doesn’t know the answer.

Here’s an example.  Suppose you go in to see your doctor because you are not feeling well.  Specifically, you might have heart palpitations, fatigue, hair loss, and muscle weakness.  You decide to go see a doctor to determine if there is something wrong with your thyroid or if it is something else.  If your doctor has access to a Watson system then he could use it to help advise him regarding your diagnosis.  In this case, Watson would already have ingested and curated all of the information in books and journals associated with thyroid disease.  It also has the diagnosis and related information from other patients from this hospital and other doctors in the practice from the electronic medical records of prior cases that it has in its data banks.  Based on the first set of symptoms you might report it would generate a hypothesis along with probabilities associated with the hypothesis (i.e. 60% hyperthyroidism, 40% anxiety, etc.).  It might then ask for more information.  As it is fed this information, i.e. example patient history, Watson would continue to refine its hypothesis along with the probability of the hypothesis being correct.  After it is given all of the information and it iterates through it and presents the diagnosis with the highest confidence level, the physician would use this information to help assist him in making the diagnosis and developing a treatment plan.  If Watson doesn’t know the answer, it will state that it has does not have an answer or doesn’t have enough information to provide an answer.

IBM likens the process of training a Watson to teaching a child how to learn.  A child can read a book to learn.  However, he can also learn by a teacher asking questions and reinforcing the answers about that text.

Can I buy a Watson?

Watson will be offered in the cloud in an “as a service” model.  Since Watson is in its own class, let’s call this Watson as a Service (WaaS).  Since Watson’s knowledge is essentially built in tiers, the idea is that IBM will provide the basic core knowledge in a particular WaaS solution space, say all of the corpus about a particular subject – like diabetes – and then different users could build on this.

For example, in September IBM announced an agreement to create the first commercial applications of Watson with WellPoint – a health benefits company. Under the agreement, WellPoint will develop and launch Watson-based solutions to help improve patient care. IBM will develop the base Watson healthcare technology on which WellPoint’s solution will run.  Last month, Cedars-Sinai signed on with WellPoint to help develop an oncology solution using Watson.  Cedars-Sinai’s oncology experts will help develop recommendations on appropriate clinical content for the WellPoint health care solutions. They will assist in the evaluation and testing of these tools.  In fact, these oncologists will “enter hypothetical patient scenarios, evaluate the proposed treatment options generated by IBM Watson, and provide guidance on how to improve the content and utility of the treatment options provided to the physicians.”  Wow.

Moving forward, picture potentially large numbers of core knowledge bases that are trained and available for particular companies to build upon.  This would be available in a public cloud model and potentially a private one as well, but with IBM involvement.  This might include Watsons for law or financial planning or even politics (just kidding) – any area where there is a huge corpus of information that people need to wrap their arms around in order to make better decisions.

IBM is now working with its partners to figure out what the user interface for these Watsons- as a Service might look like.  Will Watson ask the questions?  Can end-users, say doctors, put in their own information and Watson will use it?  This remains to be seen.

Ready for Watson?

In the meantime, IBM recently rolled out its “Ready for Watson.”  The idea is that a move to Watson might not be a linear progression.  It depends on the business  problem that companies are looking to solve.  So IBM has tagged certain of its products as “ready” to be incorporated into a Watson solution.  IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare is one example of this.  It combines IBM’s content analytics and predictive analytics solutions that are components of Watson.  Therefore, if a company used this solution it could migrate it to a Watson-as a Service deployment down the road.

So happy anniversary IBM Watson!  You have many people excited and some people a little bit scared.  For myself, I am excited to see where Watson is on its first anniversary and am looking forward to see what progress it has made on its second anniversary.

Four Vendor Views on Big Data and Big Data Analytics: IBM

Next in my discussion of big data providers is IBM.   Big data plays right into IBM’s portfolio of solutions in the information management space.  It also dove tails very nicely with the company’s Smarter Planet strategy.  Smarter Planet holds the vision of the world as a more interconnected, instrumented, and intelligent place.  IBM’s Smarter Cities and Smarter Industries are all part of its solutions portfolio.  For companies to be successful in this type of environment requires a new emphasis on big data and big data analytics.

Here’s a quick look at how IBM is positioning around big data, some of its product offerings, and use cases for big data analytics.

IBM

According to IBM, big data has three characteristics.  These are volume, velocity, and variety.   IBM is talking about large volumes of both structured and unstructured data.  This can include audio and video together with text and traditional structured data.  It can be gathered and analyzed in real time.

IBM has both hardware and software products to support both big data and big data analytics.  These products include:

• Infosphere Streams – a platform that can be used to perform deep analysis of massive volumes of relational and non-relational data types with sub-millisecond response times.   Cognos Real-time Monitoring can also be used with Infosphere Streams for dashboarding capabilities.
• Infosphere BigInsights – a product that consists of IBM research technologies on top of open source Apache Hadoop.  BigInsights provides core installation, development tools, web-based UIs, connectors for integration, integrated text analytics, and BigSheets for end-user visualization.
• IBM Netezza – a high capacity appliance that allows companies to analyze pedabytes of data in minutes.
• Cognos Consumer Insights- Leverages BigInsights and text analytics capabilities to perform social media sentiment analysis.
• IBM SPSS- IBM’s predictive and advanced analytics platform that can read data from various data sources such as Netezza and be integrated with Infosphere Streams to perform advanced analysis.
• IBM Content Analytics – uses text analytics to analyze unstructured data.  This can sit on top of Infosphere BigInsights.

At the Information on Demand (IOD) conference a few months ago, IBM and its customers presented many use cases around big data and big data analytics. Here is what some of the early adopters are doing:

• Engineering:  Analyzing hourly wind data, radiation, heat and 78 other attributes to determine where to locate the next wind power plant.
• Business:
  • Analyzing social media data, for example to understand what fans are saying about a sports game in real time.
  • Analyzing customer activity at a zoo to understand guest spending habits, likes and dislikes.
• Analyzing healthcare data:
  • Analyzing streams of data from medical devices in neonatal units.
  •  Healthcare Predictive Analytics.  One hospital is using a product called Content and Predictive analytics to understand limit early hospital discharges which would result in re-admittance to the hospital

IBM is working with its clients and prospects to implement big data initiatives.  These initiatives generally involve a services component given the range of product offerings IBM has in the space and the newness of the market.  IBM is making significant investments in tools, integrated analytic accelerators, and solution accelerators to reduce deployment time and cost to deploy these kinds of solutions.

At IBM, big data is about the “the art of the possible.”   According to the company, price points on products that may have been too expensive five years ago are coming down.  IBM is a good example of a vendor that is both working with customers to push the envelope in terms of what is possible with big data and, at the same time, educating the market about big data.   The company believes that big data can change the way companies do business.  It’s still early in the game, but IBM has a well-articulated vision around big data.  And, the solutions its clients discussed were big, bold, and very exciting.  The company is certainly a leader in this space.

Four Vendor Views on Big Data and Big Data Analytics Part 2- SAS

Next up in my discussion on big data providers is SAS.  What’s interesting about SAS is that, in many ways, big data analytics is really just an evolution for the company.  One of the company’s goals has always been to support complex analytical problem solving.  It is well respected by its customers for its ability to analyze data at scale.  It is also well regarded for its ETL capabilities.  SAS has had parallel processing capabilities for quite some time.  Recently, the company has been pushing analytics into databases and appliances.  So, in many ways big data is an extension of what SAS has been doing for quite a while.

At SAS, big data goes hand in hand with big data analytics.  The company is focused on analyzing big data to make decisions.  SAS defines big data as follows, “When volume, velocity and variety of data exceeds an organization’s storage or compute capacity for accurate and timely decision-making.”   However, SAS also includes another attribute when discussing big data which is relevance in terms of analysis.  In other words, big data analytics is not simply about analyzing large volumes of disparate data types in real time.  It is also about helping companies to analyze relevant data.

SAS can support several different big data analytics scenarios.  It can deal with complete datasets.   It can also deal with situations where it is not technically feasible to utilize an entire big data set or where the entire set is not relevant to the analysis.  In fact, SAS supports what it terms a “stream it, store it, score it” paradigm to deal with big data relevance.   It likens this to an email spam filter that determines what emails are relevant for a person.  Only appropriate emails go to the person to be read.  Likewise, only relevant data for a particular kind of analysis might be analyzed using SAS statistical and data mining technologies.

The specific solutions that support the “stream it, store it, score it” model include:

• Data reduction of very large data volumes using stream processing.  This occurs at the data preparation stage.  SAS Information Management capabilities are leveraged to interface with various data sources that can be streamed into the platform and filtered based on analytical models built from what it terms “organizational knowledge” using products like SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Text Miner and SAS Social Network Analytics. SAS Information Management (SAS DI Studio, DI Server, which includes DataFlux capabilities) provides the high speed filtering and data enrichment (with additional meta-data that is used to build more indices that makes the downstream analytics process more efficient).  In other words, it utilizes analytics and data management to prioritize, categorize, and normalize data while it is determining relevance.  This means that massive amounts of data does not have to be stored in an appliance or data warehouse.

• SAS High Performance Computing (HPC). SAS HPC includes a combination of grid, in-memory and in-database technologies. It is appliance ready software built on specifically configured hardware from SAS database partners.  In addition to the technology, SAS provides pre-packaged solutions that are using the in-memory architecture approach.
• SAS Business Analytics.  SAS offerings include a combination of reporting, BI, and other advanced analytics functionality (including text analytics, forecasting, operations research, model management and deployment) using some of the same tools (SAS Enterprise Miner, etc) as listed above.  SAS also includes support for mobile devices.

Of course, this same set of products can be used to handle a complete data set.

Additionally, SAS supports a Hadoop implementation to enable its customers to push data into Hadoop and be able to manage it.  SAS analytics software can be used to run against Hadoop for analysis.  The company is working to utilize SAS within Hadoop so that data does not have to be brought out to SAS software.

SAS has utilized its software to help clients solve big data problems in a number of areas including:

• Retail:  Analyzing data in real time at check-out to determine store coupons at big box stores; Markdown optimization at point of sale; Assortment planning
• Finance: Scoring transactional data in real time for credit card fraud prevention and detection; Risk modeling: e.g. moving from looking at loan risk modeling as one single model to  running multiple models against a complete data set that is segmented.
• Customer Intelligence: using social media information and social network analysis

For example, one large U.S. insurance company is scoring over 600,000 records per second on a multi node parallel set of processors.

What is a differentiator about the SAS approach is that since the company has been growing its big data capabilities through time, all of the technologies are delivered or supported based on a common framework or platform.  While newer vendors may try to down play SAS by saying that its technology has been around for thirty years, why is that a bad thing?  This has given the company time to grow its analytics arsenal and to put together a cohesive solution that is architected so that the piece parts can work together.  Some of the newer big data analytics vendors don’t have nearly the analytics capability of SAS.   Experience matters.  Enough said for now.

Next Up:  IBM

Four Vendor Views on Big Data and Big Data Analytics Part 1: Attensity

I am often asked whether it is the vendors or the end users who are driving the Big Data market. I usually reply that both are. There are early adopters of any technology that push the vendors to evolve their own products and services. The vendors then show other companies what can be done with this new and improved technology.

Big Data and Big Data Analytics are hot topics right now. Different vendors of course, come at it from their own point of view. Here’s a look at how four vendors (Attensity, IBM, SAS, and SAP) are positioning around this space, some of their product offerings, and use cases for Big Data Analytics.

In Attensity’s world Big Data is all about high volume customer conversations. Attensity text analytics solutions can be used to analyze both internal and external data sources to better understand the customer experience. For example, it can analyze sources such as call center notes, emails, survey verbatim and other documents to understand customer behavior. With its recent acquisition of Biz360 the company can combine social media from 75 million sources and analyze this content to understand the customer experience. Since industry estimates put the structured/unstructured data ratio at 20%/80%, this kind of data needs to be addressed. While vendors with Big Data appliances have talked about integrating and analyzing unstructured data as part of the Big Data equation, most of what has been done to date has dealt primarily with structured data. This is changing, but it is good to see a text analytics vendor address this issue head on.

Attensity already has a partnership with Teradata so it can marry information extracted from its unstructured data (from internal conversations) together with structured data stored in the Teradata Warehouse. Recently, Attensity extended this partnership to Aster data, which was acquired by Teradata. Aster Data provides a platform for Big Data Analytics. The Aster MapReduce Platform is a massively parallel software solution that embeds MapReduce analytic processing with data stores for big data analytics on what the company terms “multistructured data sources and types.” Attensity can now be embedded as a runtime SQL in the Aster Data library to enable the real time analysis of social media streams. Aster Data will also act as long term archival and analytics platform for the Attensity real-time Command Center platform for social media feeds and iterative exploratory analytics. By mid 2012 the plan is for complete integration to the Attensity Analyze application.

Attensity describes several use cases for the real time analysis of social streams:

1. Voice of the Customer Command Center: the ability to semantically annotate real-time social data streams and combine that with multi-channel customer conversation data in a Command Center view that gives companies a real-time view of what customers are saying about their company, products and brands.
2. Hotspotting: the ability to analyze customer conversations to identify emerging trends. Unlike common keyword based approaches, Hotspot reports identify issues that a company might not already know about, as they emerge, by measuring the “significance” of change in probability for a data value between a historical period and the current period. Attensity then assigns a “temperature” value to mark the degree of difference between the two probabilities. Hot means significantly trending upward in the current period vs. historical. Cold means significantly trending downward in the current period vs. historical.
3. Customer service: the ability to analyze conversations to identify top complaints and issues and prioritize incoming calls, emails or social requests accordingly.

Next Up:SAS

The Inaugural Hurwitz & Associates Predictive Analytics Victory Index is complete!

For more years than I like to admit, I have been focused on the importance of managing data so that it helps companies anticipate changes and therefore be prepared to take proactive action. Therefore, as I watched the market for predictive analytics really emerge I thought it was important to provide customers with a holistic perspective on the value of commercial offerings. I was determined that when I provided this analysis it would be based on real world factors. Therefore, I am delighted to announce the release of the Hurwitz & Associates Victory Index for Predictive Analytics! I’ve been working on this report for a quite some time and I believe that it will be very valuable tool for companies looking to understand predictive analytics and the vendors that play in this market.

Predictive analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal. Hurwitz & Associates defines predictive analytics as:

A statistical or data mining solution consisting of algorithms and techniques that can be used on both structured and unstructured data (together or individually) to determine future outcomes. It can be deployed for prediction, optimization, forecasting, simulation, and many other uses.

So what is this report all about? The Hurwitz & Associates Victory Index is a market research assessment tool, developed by Hurwitz & Associates that analyzes vendors across four dimensions: Vision, Viability, Validity and Value. Hurwitz & Associates takes a holistic view of the value and benefit of important technologies. We assess not just the technical capability of the technology but its ability to provide tangible value to the business. For the Victory Index we examined more than fifty attributes including: customer satisfaction, value/price, time to value, technical value, breadth and depth of functionality, customer adoption, financial viability, company vitality, strength of intellectual capital, business value, ROI, and clarity and practicality of strategy and vision. We also examine important trends in the predictive analytics market as part of the report and provide detailed overviews of vendor offerings in the space.

Some of the key vendor highlights include:
• Hurwitz & Associates named six vendors as Victors across two categories including SAS, IBM (SPSS), Pegasystems, Pitney Bowes, StatSoft and Angoss.
• Other vendors recognized in the Victory Index include KXEN, Megaputer Intelligence, Rapid-I, Revolution Analytics, SAP, and TIBCO.

Some of the key market findings include:
• Vendors have continued to place an emphasis on improving the technology’s ease of use, making strides towards automating model building capabilities and presenting findings in business context.
• Predictive analytics is no longer relegated to statisticians and mathematicians. The user profile for predictive analytics has shifted dramatically as the ability to leverage data for competitive advantage has placed business analysts in the driver’s seat.
• As companies gather greater volumes of disparate kinds of data, both structured and unstructured, they require solutions that can deliver high performance and scalability.
• The ability to operationalize predictive analytics is growing in importance as companies have come to understand the advantage to incorporating predictive models in their business processes. For example, statisticians at an insurance company might build a model that predicts the likelihood of a claim being fraudulent.

I invite you to find out more about the report by visiting our website: www.hurwitz.com

Four Findings from the Hurwitz & Associates Advanced Analytics Survey

Hurwitz & Associates conducted an online survey on advanced analytics in January 2011. Over 160 companies across a range of industries and company size participated in the survey. The goal of the survey was to understand how companies are using advanced analytics today and what their plans are for the future. Specific topics included:

- Motivation for advanced analytics
- Use cases for advanced analytics
- Kinds of users of advanced analytics
- Challenges with advanced analytics
- Benefits of the technology
- Experiences with BI and advanced analytics
- Plans for using advanced analytics

What is advanced analytics ?
Advanced analytics provides algorithms for complex analysis of either structured or unstructured data. It includes sophisticated statistical models, machine learning, neural networks, text analytics, and other advanced data mining techniques. Among its many use cases, it can be deployed to find patterns in data, prediction, optimization, forecasting, and for complex event processing. Examples include predicting churn, identifying fraud, market basket analysis, and analyzing social media for brand management. Advanced analytics does not include database query and reporting and OLAP cubes.

Many early adopters of this technology have used predictive analytics as part of their marketing efforts. However, the diversity of use cases for predictive analytics is growing. In addition to marketing related analytics for use in areas such as market basket analysis, promotional mix, consumer behavior analysis, brand loyalty, churn analysis, companies are using the technology in new and innovative ways. For example, there are newer industry use cases emerging including reliability assessment (i.e. predicting failure in machines), situational awareness, behavior (defense), investment analysis, fraud identification (insurance, finance), predicting disabilities from claims (insurance), and finding patterns in health related data (medical)

The two charts below illustrate several key findings from the survey on how companies use advanced analytics and who within the organization is using this technology.

• Figure 1 indicates that the top uses for advanced analytics include finding patterns in data and building predictive models.

• Figure 2 illustrates that users of advanced analytics in many organizations have expanded from statisticians and other highly technical staff to include business analysts and other business users. Many vendors anticipated this shift to business users and enhanced their offerings by adding new user interfaces, for example, which suggest or dictate what model should be used, given a certain set of data.

Other highlights include:

• Survey participants have seen a huge business benefit from advanced analytics. In fact, over 40% of the respondents who had implemented advanced analytics believed it had increased their company’s top-line revenue. Only 2% of respondents stated that advanced analytics provided little or no value to their company.
• Regardless of company size, the vast majority of respondents expected the number of users of advanced analytics in their companies to increase over the next six to 12 months. In fact, over 50% of respondents currently using the technology expected the number of users to increase over this time period.

The final report will be published in March 2011. Stay tuned!

Advanced Analytics and the skills needed to make it happen: Takeaways from IBM IOD

Advanced Analytics was a big topic at the IBM IOD conference last week. As part of this, predictive analytics was again an important piece of the story along with other advanced analytics capabilities IBM has developed or is in the process of developing to support optimization. These include Big Insights (for big data), analyzing data streams, content/text analytics, and of course, the latest release of Cognos.

One especially interesting topic that was discussed at the conference was the skills required to make advanced analytics a reality. I have been writing and thinking a lot this subject so I was very happy to hear IBM address it head on during the second day keynote. This keynote included a customer panel and another speaker, Dr. Atul Gawande, and both offered some excellent insights. The panel included Scott Friesen (Best Buy), Scott Futren (Guinnett County Public Schools), Srinivas Koushik (Nationwide), and Greg Christopher (Nestle). Here are some of the interrelated nuggets from the discussions:

• Ability to deliver vs. the ability to absorb. One panelist made the point that a lot of new insights are being delivered to organizations. In the future, it may become difficult for people to absorb all of this information (and this will require new skills too).
• Analysis and interpretation. People will need to know how to analyze and how to interpret the results of an analysis. As Dr. Gawande pointed out, “Having knowledge is not the same as using knowledge effectively.”
• The right information. One of the panelists mentioned that putting analytics tools in the hands of line people might be too much for them, and instead the company is focusing on giving these employees the right information.
• Leaders need to have capabilities too. If executives are accustomed to using spreadsheets and relying on their gut instincts, then they will also need to learn how to make use of analytics.
• Cultural changes. From call center agents using the results of predictive models to workers on the line seeing reports to business analysts using more sophisticated models, change is coming. This change means people will be changing the way that they work. How this change is handled will require special thought by organizations.

IBM executives also made a point of discussing the critical skills required for analytics. These included strategy development, developing user interfaces, enterprise integration, modeling, and dealing with structured and unstructured data. IBM has, of course, made a huge investment in these skills. GBS executives emphasized the 8,500 employees in its Global Business Services Business Analytics and Optimization group. Executives also pointed to the fact that the company has thousands of partners in this space and that 1 in 3 IBMers will attend analytics training. So, IBM is prepared to help companies in their journey into business analytics.

Are companies there yet? I think that it is going to take organizations time to develop some of these skills (and some they should probably outsource). Sure, analytics has been around a long time. And sure, vendors are making their products easier to use and that is going to help end users become more effective. Even if we’re just talking about a lot of business people making use of analytic software (as opposed to operationalizing it in a business process), the reality is that analytics requires a certain mindset. Additionally, unless someone understands the context of the information he or she is dealing with, it doesn’t matter how user friendly the platform is – they can still get it wrong. People using analytics will need to think critically about data, understand their data, and understand context. They will also need to know what questions to ask.

I whole-heartedly believe it is worth the investment of time and energy to make analytics happen.

Please note:

As luck would have it, I am currently fielding a study on advanced analytics! In am interested in understanding what your company’s plans are for advanced analytics. If you’re not planning to use advanced analytics, I’d like to know why. If you’re already using advanced analytics I’d like to understand your experience.

If you participate in this survey I would be happy to send you a report of our findings. Simply provide your email address at the end of the survey! Here’s the link:

Click here to take survey