Thursday, 19 September 2013

The Business Analytics Loop and Big Data Applications



Business analytics is all about transforming irrelevant and meaningless data into valuable insights. For analytical practices and approaches to reach their full and optimum potential, business analytics tools and platforms are required to make it easy for customers to take action based on their new insights. They must analyze, feed and monitor the final results of actions taken back into the system in an automated and systematic way to improve and inform the predictive models that led to the insights at the very first place. One can actually consider this process as of closing the big data analytical loop. For an example – A business consumer at a big vendor uses self business intelligence tools to decide whether to offer or not a new promotional campaign. In between user analyzes that the three hour online sale will likely result in significant revenue generation based on the intelligence yielded by the underlying analytics engine. The user has to implement the campaign, keep a track of its performance and makes necessary adjustments to future ones as assured and guaranteed.
In existing environments, the foremost step needs the user to exit the business intelligence application and log into a different campaign management system to raise the sales and its related promotional efforts. The user afterwards waits for a day or two to get the canned and static report with metrics and finally suggest to a central analytics team to adjust the analytical models based on the positive or negative results. If the user is lucky, those suggestions might make their way into the analytic process and loop will never be closed. Customers continue to make decisions entirely based on the analytics and intelligence essentially frozen and numb in time till someone lifts the chain to redo the entire process. Again the whole process gets repeated.
Closing the business analytical loop needs essential anticipation into how data and application infrastructures are crafted and defined. Big data visualization strategies, analytical engines and transactional systems should be capable to bi directionally interact in real time situations. The transactional and BI applications should be tightly blended with the functionality built into BI applications. In an ideal manner, non relational databases should play a role to board multi structured data including social and machine generated data. Cultural issues should be overcome and no longer be an excuse acceptable from IT pros, analysts and business user’s side for clinging on inefficient, outdated and hoaxed analytic processes. So the next time the user conduct a similar kind of analysis, the big data recommendation engine suggestions generated will be informed by the relative success or failure of real world campaigns and the entire process will get repeated. Moreover more iteration in the recommendations and analytics improvises and increases the revenue generation.
Along with this, big data pioneers and supporters maintain that the sheer volume of data and information diminishes the effects of occasional poor quality of data. If you are browsing for peta bytes of data to determine historical trends, a few data input issues will barely list as a glitch on a dashboard or reports. It does not mean that the data quality is not vital to big data. It is true in real time transactional situations. Likewise big data applications that recommend doses and medicines for critically ill patients are better be entrusting over good data. Same goes for big data operational applications that affirm commercial aviation, industrial internet use cases and the power grid. It is mandatory for professionals to acknowledge the source and structure of the data along with the data quality prerequisites for apt big data use cases including recommendation engine in order to evaluate the type and quality of tools and measures to apply. And, the biggest key players dealing in big data and its real time use cases are IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, CSC, 
IB Technology , Informatica and Infosys.

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