Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Decisions in the NOW, increases the desire for analytics as a key component of an Information Driven Enterprise


Again on a flight to Europe this week, I struck up a discussion with a fellow traveler who is out the oil and Gas industry while sitting in Abu Dhabi on a layover. It was around the transformation of decisions support from reports, to dashboards, and now for a need for more real time decision support.  This discussion aligns with the Information Driven concepts and the transformation from reports to predictive and decision dashboards.

Information Driven Companies are looking for more than what has happened they driving to understand what will happen?
It is crucial to note Excel, BI and EMI tools provide extremely solid basis for analysis in the past and now, and in a focused area, but as decisions become more predictive the way to sure up the prediction is to start looking across significantly bigger data to see common patterns. EMI provides dashboards and alerts based upon basic rules and KPIs this is still required.
Source ARC



The above diagram shows the evolution of Enterprise Intelligence and Business Intelligence from the understanding of today to a more predictive requirement, this is from ARC. When I talk with customers, I use the Operational Excellence Journey diagram below to describe the evolution to real time, agile decisions. It is vital that companies accept that achieving operational excellence is a journey not a one off project as it evolves as the company learns and tunes.




As you move to right the analysis and analytics start looking for patterns, and relationships across data sources, and linking causes to a set of conditions. BI and EMI remain indispensable tools of information driven companies, but they do have limitations. For example, BI involves the IT and runs in batches of set time breaks while information driven companies are requiring broad access to analytical information and they need it continuously in real time. Finally to be able to adapt quickly to market place changes, information driven companies need to look forward, predicting what will happen next. Traditionally BI/ EMI systems have not incorporated predictive analytics tools to apply pattern matching rule and algorithms to historical data.
These requirements combine with the new technologies that are now coming common place and transforming the capabilities of large data analysis. Four overarching trends are transforming the industry: e.g.| Data, predictive analytics, self-service/ embedded analytics and cloud based analytics. Advance techniques such as data mining, predictive analytics, statistical analysis, data visualization, text analytics/ natural language processing can all be applied with e.g.| Data to discover new patterns and relationships opening new understanding and potentially operational advantage.. This significant trend, reinforced by the fact that modern predictive analytics tools do not necessarily require advanced skills, and thus overcome many of restrictions of traditional predictive tools. Many of us are evolving technologies and tools, that will analytics and simulation module as part of a supervisory/ operational experience (similar to alarming). Enabling small forward-looking models to run off existing  systems and history to allow a forward look based on the situation today. Combine this with users now getting information for decisions via advanced analytics tools on top of traditional data sources that they can use themselves(self-service) and immediate value. Next week I will expand on some of key transformations in the Intelligence BI worlds that apply in operations.
 

No comments:

Post a Comment