Advanced Analytics: An Intro
Advanced Analytics (AA) at best, can easily be mentioned as Interactive Decision Making, with the help of business focused subject areas. In fact, these Advanced Analytics are the focused Decision Support Systems, that help make decisions thru established interactive methods like OLAP, Sandboxes and other Statistical Analysis.
However, for these Advanced Analytics to be made possible, we need the have the appropriate Business Domain Knowledge and the Frameworks to quickly deploy and make them adoptable. Hence, we may say that customers can easily leverage their existing BI installations for Advanced Analytics, as they would have the necessary cleansed, meaningful and well arranged data.
Most of the BI usage, at the most, is around reporting only. Very few have ventured into AA, although we are seeing some such stuff in the Performance Management or CPM areas. Deploying Advanced Analytics will be easy if the customer already have some kind of BI DW in place, as this becomes the very foundation of it. In that case, deployment of AA in the absence of established BI environment, will be challenging in timelines and efforts. Quicker deployment of BI environment can be achieved through deployment of ready-made BI solution frameworks, which are best addressed through mature domain BI data models.
Some vendors are already offering AA applications, especially in the areas of Procurement Spend Analytics, Value Chain, Activity Based Costing, Fraud, Production Planning, Customer Churn, ALM, Warranty Budgeting etc. There is another school of thought to include the real time analytics / decision making also as part of AA.
AA is very popular nowadays, but will be interesting to note the percentage of revenues, compared to the regular development & maintenance revenues. Will be continued in my future blogs.
Comments
KN you seem to be hitting the nail right, and it cant be better time than now to look towards Advanced Analytics. Predicting future, aligning your business strategies by getting insights into historical trends which were hidden till now, is inevitable. Interesting would be to see how people would start implementing AA beyond recognizing its important.
Posted by: Yogesh Bhatt | January 25, 2010 11:02 AM
I agree that, from an enterprise perspective having a DW/BI is the first step towards AA. However, it would have been more apt to define AA as "Interactive Data Visualization" instead of "Interactive Decision Making".
Posted by: Arun T | February 5, 2010 01:58 PM
Dear Arunachalam,
Appreciate your comments. Thanks for the same. Advanced Analytics is a new rage in the market, which is only facilitated by proper data arrangement and availability of correct interactive tools with the business users. Something like Vendor spend analytics or Value Chain Analytics need continuously interactions with the data, so that business users can get some trends, hidden facts for optimisation etc. Hence, I called it as Interactive Decision Making. Usually, the interactive decision making is possible in an OLAP environment.
Now coming to the Interactive Data Visualisation: This is something attributed to the tools like TIBCO Spotfire or QlikView. These provide quick understanding on the data, by identifying the trends, outliers etc. This are tools that can be used on data that is laid out haphazardly. Usually used in quicker decision making. However, there is also a possibility of using the Interactive Visualisation tools on the OLAP environment, to get some applications built quickly.
Just wanted to bring out the fact that IDM and IDV are different concepts. Hope this explains. Do call me if you have any other queries.
Posted by: Kopparapu Narasimha Rao | February 9, 2010 12:48 PM