Wednesday, December 20, 2017

The Analytics Divide - Critical Capabilities for Analytics Powered by Big Data - Part 1

Competitive intensity has increased across industries in recent times. Companies are being driven to deliver a consistent stream of market successes via innovative business models and products or improved processes that continually enhance competitive advantage. Analytics powered by big data has been the propelling force behind this wave of innovation, and executives across industries are being challenged to replicate the ubiquitous success stories achieved with analytics.
However, the hype around analytics successes is tending to gloss over the critical enablers and hard work necessary to reach the end of that rainbow. Latent in that hype is an alternative reality where most companies are actually still struggling to figure out how to use analytics to take advantage of their data.
There is a deep analytical divide in the industry, which needs to be recognized. It can perhaps be explained only in the relative maturity of the prior BI programs of these analytical ‘haves’ where the critical enablers were more or less already in place. Most other organizations today have an analytics vision, but lack an analytics strategy backed up by a practical plan to get there. According to an MIT Sloane survey, only 30 percent of respondents overall declared having a formal long-term big data and analytics plan. As big data capabilities continue to become an enterprise enabler, those who have waited cannot remain in the harbor forever.
How to engineer the bridge over this divide is an extremely relevant topic today for discussion. In this three-blog series, I will analyze the enablers and impediments of big data adoption, identify the possibilities and priorities the industry has set regarding the big data and analytics domain, and look at the prevalent patterns and practices in the different journeys organizations are undertaking. I will share an incremental adoption roadmap based on these elements that will attempt to address the concerns that are holding back organizations, and I will suggest a reference architecture that supports that incremental build to support more advanced capabilities and progressive complexities of a big data capability.
"There is a deep analytical divide in the industry, which needs to be recognized. It can perhaps be explained only in the relative maturity of the prior BI programs of these analytical ‘haves’ where the critical enablers were more or less already in place."

Enablers and impediments to analytics success


The Harvard Business Review explains that, at this point in the evolution of big data, the challenges for most companies are not related to technology. While gaining technology capabilities poses a challenge to adopting big data in the enterprise, many other factors play a big role, including culture, strategy, skills, and internal investments. Here are some key drivers and impediments to success with big data:
Data-driven culture: The previously mentioned MIT Sloane survey explains that most companies are not prepared for the robust investment and cultural changes that are required to achieve sustained success with analytics, including expanding the skill set of managers who use data, broadening the types of decisions influenced by data, and cultivating decision-making that blends analytical insights with intuition.
Deployment challenges: Leveraging the potential of predictive models has quite a few practical challenges. An article from BI-Bestpractices.com explains that an analytical model has to produce consistent and repeatable results across the entire spectrum of input conditions and be simple enough to be deployed across all the operations impacted by the model. It has to be robust and responsive to changes in the business environment while operating within the limitations and constraints faced by the business, abide by all regulations that apply within the scope, and be intuitively explainable to management as well as to the frontline agent who, in turn, has to explain the outcome to a customer or a partner.
Strategic analytics plan: Companies that are successful with analytics are also much more likely to have a strategic plan for analytics, and this plan is usually aligned with the organization’s overall corporate strategy. These companies use analytics more broadly across the organization, and they are able to measure the results of their analytical efforts. The previously mentioned MIT Sloane survey highlights that the companies that have pulled away from the pack, “the Analytical Innovators,” are five times more likely to have a formal strategy for analytics than the least mature group. These companies recognize that they need to put in place a robust analytics culture. Data analytics is used by their C-suite for providing strategic direction to the whole organization and used by middle management to improve day-to-day operation of the organization.
Data privacy concerns: One of the biggest data challenges is around privacy and what is shared versus what is not shared. Self-service data access and broad data exploration that are crucial for analytics are also inherently risky in terms of privacy violations and compliance infractions. To avoid these problems, data governance policies need to be updated or extended to encompass data from the organization’s data lake, and users should be trained in how the policies affect their work with data in the lake. But there are very few data management professionals available for hiring who have prior experience with data lakes and Hadoop to frame these policies and implement them.
Skill gap: Big data technologies require a skill set that is new to most IT departments, which need expert data engineers to integrate all the relevant internal and external sources of data. Data scientists in a big data team should be comfortable speaking the language of business and helping leaders reformulate their challenges in ways that big data can tackle. In a world that’s flooded with data, it has become harder to use this data: there’s too much of it to make sense of unless the analysis starts with an insight or hypothesis to test. Here, the role of domain specialists has become absolutely essential for asking the right questions. People with these skills are hard to find and in great demand.
Drying up investments: As the hype around big data has ebbed down, it increasingly requires the same expectations for results as other IT projects. Where companies previously have been willing to fill data lakes with big data projects, executives may now want to see tangible business results faster to justify the initial and ongoing organizational investment in these projects.
These success factors are largely preventing many organizations from embarking on their big data and analytics journey. Yet, an agile management culture tuned to rapidly changing market conditions is going to be a pre-requisite to survival, if not success, in the next decade. Closing that capability gap is becoming mandatory for those that have yet to embrace analytics.
The requisite capabilities can only be gained through a managed transformation, an incremental build up in a phased approach where the big data journey is mapped in clear, achievable but increasingly challenging milestones. Here, success in each phase brings in capabilities required for the next level of complexity in terms of implementation complexity and organization change management.
In the next part of this blog, I will talk about the incremental complexities and more advanced capabilities and skills needed in inducting the different nature and types of big data, and the evolving architecture patterns needed to support that progressive complexity.

Source :- Suman Ghosh (Center of Excellence at TCS)
URL: :- http://info.tcs.com/enterprise-solutions-oracle-the-analytics-divide-blog.html?utm_source=TWTOrg&utm_medium=BLGBD&utm_campaign=ORACLE
K@run@

No comments:

Post a Comment