Communications of the ACM
Beyond Data and Analysis
Credit: Vitaliy Novitsky
Wherever business executives turn these days, someone expounds the merits of business analytics, or some derivative of business analytics like supply chain analytics or marketing analytics or human resources analytics, or even predictive or Web or visual or data or streaming analytics, or any number of others.5,8 The academic community is also promoting this emerging view of analytics.6 There has recently been a call for a new professional role, that of the data scientist, to implement and diffuse analytics methodologies into and across organizations.3 There is even concern there will not be enough of these new professionals to meet the growing demand for this analytics specialty even in the immediate future. So, what does all of this really mean?
Today, businesses are awash in data.10 In wave after disruptive wave of technological and organizational change, business leaders face a host of powerful forces. For example, information processing has become increasingly more powerful and flexible, with faster and higher-capacity storage and networks. Simultaneously, globalization and other competitive factors have exerted strong pressures to improve efficiencies and effectiveness, and to strengthen business and customer relationships. Each successive stage of this competition requires more data and more analysis to support strategic, managerial, and operational decision-making. This competition, therefore, is driving a quest for more and better analytics technology; and this technology, in turn, helps to make competition even more intense. This cycle results in a confluence of competitive imperatives and technological advancements that interact dramatically. More effective analytics enables a higher level of competition; and higher competition creates further imperatives to make the analytics more effective. Advancing technology creates more competition, which creates more technology, which creates more competition, and so it goes.
Comments
peter wright
Information Technology is constantly changing. Organizations or firms have to keep up with the ever changing markets. Data analysis as observed in this article above goes way beyond the ordinary regressions. Data is needed in almost every facet of the todays fast pace workplace and or organizations.
Globalization has strengthen the way people perceived or retrieved information. Take for example, the pregnant mother or expected mother. Because of Innovation and Technology she is able to know the type of baby she's expecting.
Same can be said, on the political scope, one can predict the outcome of an election base soley on data that is computed and the areas by which the candidates are leadking. Data harvesting is also another for of gathering information. Then there's Facebook, one of the World's largest Social Media that links one person to as many as possible.
Advancement in technology creates much more competition - for example NASA and sending astronauts into space - verses now, sending the first car into space, without any human being.
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