Democratizing Analytics - Is it possible?
A lot has been said & written about sustainable competitive advantage that could be gained by organizations by leveraging analytics. While large organizations might have the wherewithal to put in place a robust data & analytic infrastructure, attract talent to leverage their data & analytic stack, most small & medium enterprises would be lucky to have just clean data.
Also, commercial feasibility of implementing analytic tools and / or recruiting dedicated analysts may be a problem. So can't these businesses leverage the power analytics: to increase new customer additions, target specific customer segments to improve marketing effectiveness & increase revenue / profitability per customer, predict demand, reduce stock-outs/surpluses?
If you are a business manager wanting to do better on the above metrics, think you have the relevant data, but not the right tools or skills at your command, what would you do?
Among options like hiring a consultant, how about if you could put out your business question & relevant data securely over the web to a reliable partner who could analyze the data, deliver insights, and provide specific recommendations on improving business metrics?
To put it shortly, how about if you had a choice to consume "Analytics as a Service"? How would you value it? Do you think this is possible?
Comments
Santhana,
I believe that "Analytics as a service" or "Analytics on Demand" or "Analytics on the cloud" - whichever name you call this, is the future. It enables firms to organizations to leverage the best talent globally, convert their fixed costs into variable costs, avoid upfront investments, focus on their core business and last but not the least, drive change slowly by encouraging people to leverage the on demand capabilities of their partners.
Regards
Rahul
Posted by: Rahul Shah | November 3, 2009 2:30 PM