Inside the Briefcase
Dawn Of An Intelligent Age
May 16, 2011 No CommentsSOURCE: Business Standards
Data analysis and information used to be a river, flowing in one predictable direction with a visible source. No more. Today, it’s a roiling ocean of data, constantly expanding its shores.
Fifteen petabytes of data are created everyday. What if we could turn all of that data, videos, pictures, text, blogs, market movements and transactions into smarter information for better decisions? How do we do that? It can be a daunting task for any enterprise to sift through and undertake massive data analysis, extracting information and transforming it into actionable knowledge. But action without data analysis is just guessing.
The globally integrated enterprise needs something more powerful. Today’s information management and data analysis tools offer situational awareness and predictive abilities. This “new intelligence” combines human cognition with computational power, shifting the agenda from “sense and respond” to situational awareness and something very much like prediction.
New intelligence gives us more than a window into enterprise-wide current operations. It provides a likely view of what is just around the corner and even further down the road. Analytics and reporting tools slice and dice data, crystallising trends, patterns and anomalies that yield invaluable business insights to help you drive smarter decision-making. Understanding data patterns is important to industries like healthcare, energy, and transportation. And the more we understand, the more answers we find. That’s why data management and analysis is already helping to lower energy costs, ease traffic and detect diseases faster, all over the world.
New Intelligence, applied well, gives organisations the ability to predict and steer rather than just sense and react to events. It brings together the power of human cognition and computational excellence. It shifts the agenda to situational awareness and prediction: sudden changes in customer demand, loss of a key supplier, new environmental regulations, a new product or service that disrupts an entire industry. And when evaluating the trade-offs inherent in any business decision, New Intelligence enables organisations to calculate rather than guess at likely outcomes.
It also goes further than hands-free tracking. Companies with a store of real-time information obtained from remote sensors have the opportunity to apply advanced analytics for optimisation. An example: balancing energy efficiency with customer service requirements in a way that advances a particular business strategy. It’s safe to say that in an industry undergoing global realignment New Intelligence is likely to be a prerequisite for competitive advantage.
New Intelligence applies beyond digitised sensors and tags. County governments in one state used advanced analytics to identify analyse and identify acceptable patterns for Medicaid claims submitted by providers; outliers were automatically flagged for further investigation. Private insurance companies pioneered these same methods to eliminate fraud and waste in their payment streams in a way that pays off much more quickly than traditional auditing techniques.
