Analyzing Analytics
If your wife adds (if you are the lucky one) additional 1/2 tea spoon sugar in your bed tea, can you imagine what would be the impact on your blood sugar level and to maintain the ideal balance with calorie count how many extra steps you’ll be running. Mass penetration of internet and ever increasing health consciousness in society has ensured that everyone has easy access to appropriate diet charts and general health tips such as above are addressed to some extent. However, healthcare providers around the world who are facing the pressure of patients and healthcare authorities to improve quality care with no complications, seek an analytical solution to empower them with robust tool to analyze data and regularly identify patients at risk.
From a healthcare providers’ perspective, this is addressing a business issue. From patient’s perspective, this is advanced care. Whereas from the solution provider’s angle it’s prediction of future (likelihood of a patient developing a complication) based on history data, which has gone through statistical modeling technique. To me, this complete process, starting from problem identification to the solution implementation is appropriate exemplar of adding value in society through Predictive Analytics.
Until recently, predictive analytics solutions were serving niche business domains and within that certain specific business processes, however the intensity of investments planned by the BIG IT service providers hints at another “commoditized” IT service in the pipeline. Another exciting side of the story is that the industry is looking forward to explore the benefits for daily & intra-day operational decision making. Traditionally analytics applications have supported strategic & tactical business decision making, which did not put ‘low latency’ pressure on data integration but operational decision making needs data refresh as close to real time as possible. As far as operational analytics solutions are related, debates are already on embedded and stream analytics but the real challenge would be obviously on data feed. And it would be interesting to watch the trend, how solution providers align with this demand – whether it is much advanced data integration through typical Operational Data Store (ODS)/Data warehouse/Data mart route or Analytics Solution embedded in Business Process Workflow itself.
Whatever emerges as the largely accepted solution, one thing is certain that businesses and in turn the society are going to reap the rewards of Predictive Analytics in next decade.
Comments
Pretty good business analogy of predictive analytics. You have actually expanded the thinking on analytics. Can we can look at cloud computing to store world-wide data and use inputs to provide predictive data? This is also close to real-time decision making, as in, if a customer walks into a bank, the customer service agent can look up his details and suggest something very appropriate for his / her needs.
Posted by: KN | January 28, 2010 01:36 PM
This is bound to take big leap. We as human always do analytics in Mind. Rather mind is the best analytics tool so far to create and match patterns. No wonder, it wanders a lot as well through chain of patterns even though we don't want it to be. Similarly, the success of analytics is also dependent how good the patterns are created based on good data. Need to say bye-bye to garbage data or welcome and 'purify it' for analytics to produce fantastic results for benefits of us - as customer in healthcare, retailer, hospitality etc areas.
Posted by: Vilas Ahire | February 4, 2010 08:31 AM
Example of extra sugar have lended the touch of close-to-heart for the layman, to the thought which is otherwise be technical / business in nature. While predictive analysis can provide much required edge to the business, the true potential in this space is largely untapped due to lack of option in terms of tools, capabilities of tools and cost of development/support/maintenance of solutions. With increasing emphasis on value realisation from BI/DWH investments, this is bound to change over period of time and as rightly said, that next decade may see the explosion in space of Predictive Analysis offerings, both from service providers as well as OEM vendors. I believe that there will be the Open Source product on list of emerging trend in Gartner's paper in another 3 to 5 yrs time!
Posted by: Abhishek Gupta | March 12, 2010 09:35 AM