I rely on top newspapers and business magazines for ideas with my weekly IM blog. In fact, I'm not sure how I'd fare without the inspiration from
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, The Economist, and the
Harvard Business Review. Each of these publications focuses often on issues surrounding the measurement and analysis of business processes. And each does so with the valued perspectives of both macro forests and micro trees.
The
February 25, 2010 Economist revolves on a 14-page special report entitled
Data, Data Everywhere, must reading for those looking for the big-picture future of BI and analytics. Alas, I can touch on only a smattering of the covered topics there.
Tech bellwether Cisco estimates that by 2013, 667 exabytes (1 exabyte=1000 petabytes) of data will flow over the internet annually. Retail giant Wal-Mart now handles 1M transactions per hour, with databases sized at more than 2.5 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes). CIO Rollin Ford asks every day: “how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyze data better?” According to IBM historical writer James Cortada, “We are at a different period because of so much information.” Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Alex Szalay opines: “How to make sense of these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government or industry.”
The big four software giants Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP certainly recognize the challenge, in recent years spending $15 billion on acquisitions of software firms specializing in data management and analytics. And IBM's “Smarter Planet” strategy is backed by a $12 billion investment that includes six new analytics centers and 4000 “quants” hires. Indeed, the information management industry is now $100 billion and growing 10% per year – twice as fast as the larger software market. Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft acknowledges, “The data-centered economy is just nascent.”, even as Google chief economist, Hal Varian, notes that “statistician” is now the sexiest job around.
Having access to all that data, however, is just a point of departure: Mining and analyzing the data – business intelligence – is where the information can be monetized. An early BI leader, Wal-Mart noted in 2004 a run on flashlights and batteries – in addition to Pop-Tarts – in anticipation of a hurricane. Wal-Mart now routinely stocks up on Pop-Tarts for hurricane season. Telecoms such as Cablecom have cut their annual churn from 20% to 5% through analytics. The Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain used analytics on seven years of sales data to divine a marketing campaign to more precisely target its best customers, resulting in a 70% increase in visitors. The University of Ontario, in tandem with IBM, uses predictive models to spot potentially fatal infections in premature babies, monitoring seven streams of real-time data. Medical staff can then detect an infection before symptoms present. “You can't see it with the naked eye, but a computer can.”
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