“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding” – Marshall McLuhan. Nothing can be farther from this ‘point of view’ in today’s information intensive world; more so for organizations across industries competing for the share of the wallet. From banks, insurance organizations, healthcare providers, to manufacturers, retailers and every conceivable form of businesses are increasingly looking for intelligence to drive up business profitability instead of acting on hunches. Hence, it will be a safe bet to place that business intelligence, big data and analytics are more than just a hype. IDC research substantiates the same – Worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics is set to grow from $130.1 billion in 2016 to more than $203 billion in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7 percent.

Decoding the Data Blitzkrieg

2.5 quintillion data bytes are generated per day, up from 100 GB in 1992. That's a torrent of information created by the combined forces of social, mobile and cloud (SMAC) technologies. In the coming days, organizations will be competing basing their competency on how well they leverage this information and apply it to cater to their customers, improve product quality, decrease risk, improve processes, and the lot. The big data revolution demands that enterprises reinvent themselves to make better use of this information repository or, risk becoming obsolete in a decade or so.

Dawn of the Age of Actionable Insights – Enter Advanced Analytics

All enterprises today are striving towards delivering a differentiated customer experience. And, rigid business processes are playing the spoil sport! Think of cheque clearing processes. They are mostly focused around meeting SLAs and billing transactions. Even though there might be adequate staffing, results are usually less than optimal with high cost over-runs, work allocation issues and the risk of overshooting SLAs. The culprits - rigid processes, siloed systems and hard coded rules.

Rigid, hard coded processes has so long dictated outcomes that have not achieved much in terms of delivering differentiated customer experience. The advent of the era of digital disruption demands that customer satisfaction and outcome be placed before processes. In order to turn the table around, organizations need to build smarter processes that can respond intelligently to situations. And, analytics can form the much needed bridge between harnessing data for building smarter processes.

The Case for Smart Data

Data explosion of up to 40 zetta bytes is expected by 2020. And, about 80 percent of the data stream today are unstructured which primarily consists of information contained within emails, documents, social platforms,

blogs, conversation threads, news sites, CRMs, contracts, social network discussions, maps, text, video, images, audio files, multimedia resources and the lot. Structured data such as financial data, sales data that are already in schemas are comparatively simpler to decode, analyze and apply, whereas the ubiquitous unstructured data are a different ball game altogether.

Analytics and BPM form the power couple that is set to become absolutely indispensable in the enterprise decision making processes

Decoding Structured Data: Process driven analytics uses analytical capabilities such as diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive capabilities to read structured data and provides decision options. In conjunction with BPM, process driven analytics predicts case exceptions & process path, optimizes running processes, suggests actionable decision alternatives and remedial actions as well as intelligent Discovery of Process Improvement.


Decoding Unstructured Data: Content Analytics uses Natural Language Processing, Semantic Analysis, data/text mining, machine learning, forecasting, pattern recognition, simulation, neural network, cluster analysis and the lot to decode unstructured content into consumable bits of actionable data.

Advanced analytical capabilities are a combination of process driven analytics and content driven analytics, which complements each other to provide a holistic view of case scenarios driving decision optimization.

Smarter processes & Decision Optimization with Analytics

At its simplest, Analytics is a collection of statistical tools, techniques and algorithms, which when applied to chaotic data reads trends, finds patterns and correlations between data points to throw insights to business users. By transforming high volume, fast moving and assortment of data into more understandable and consumable format, it vastly helps in improving business processes and empowers the decision making process. Building analytical capabilities in business ecosystem necessitates understanding what each analytical framework can deliver in terms of business value.

Analytics, when paired with BPM, works wonders when it becomes a part of the automated workflow environment provided by BPM. Business Process Management forms that much needed engagement layer between core enterprise applications and the business users. Just to reiterate, Analytics and BPM forms the power couple that is set to become absolutely indispensable in the enterprise decision making processes.

Upsurge in Analytics investment

Analytics acts as a power catalyst driving positive organizational change. And, an increasing number of organizations are investing in building or sourcing analytical capabilities. Here's why it makes sense to become an analytics driven organization and hop on the analytics bandwagon

• Focused approach to achieving organizational goal

•Agility in decision making and decision optimization

• Data torrent decoded with intuitive visualization, collaboration for contextual information

•Goodbye to information bottle necks

•Competitive advantage with predictive analytical capability with faster go to market, discover new revenue opportunities

•Process efficiency with smarter process design, expert handling of exceptions driving down costs and turn around time

Takeaway

Organizations today are in a perpetual battle zone of sorts, and data and analytics serves as their tactical weapon. In such a scenario, having a robust data strategy backed by analytical insights can help organizations develop a master game plan where smart data, differentiated processes, optimized decision options are just means to an end.