Data, AI, & Machine Learning

How do the insights from big data differ from what managers generate from traditional analytics?

The rapid growth of data creates business opportunities — but only if IT and management work together.

Simon Robinson (Research Vice President at 451 Research) interviewed by Renee Boucher Ferguson A lot of the talk about analytics focuses on its potentials to provide huge insights to company managers. But analyst Simon Robinson of 451 Research says that on the more basic level, the global conversation is about big data’s more pedestrian aspects: how do you store it, and how do you transmit it? With the bird’s eye view of an analyst, Simon Robinson has paid a lot of attention in the last 12 years to how companies are collecting and transmitting increasingly enormous amounts of information. Since 2000, Robinson has been with 451 Research, an analyst group focused on enterprise IT innovation. Today he is research vice president, running the Storage and Information Management team. Based in 451 Research’s London office, Robinson and his team specialize in identifying emerging trends and technologies that are helping organizations optimize and take advantage of their data and information, and meet ever-evolving governance requirements. (He’s on Twitter at @simonrob451.) “Storage is very complex,” Robinson says. And indeed, not only does it entail managing capacity and figuring out the best collection and retrieval methods, it also means synching with both the IT and the business teams and paying attention to complex security and privacy issues. In a conversation with Renee Boucher Ferguson, a researcher and editor at MIT Sloan Management Review Robinson discussed the changing storage landscape in the era of big data and cloud computing.

The data investigation is all about how companies spot trends and how they figure out what's going on in those trends.

A new wave of analytics-driven companies is making Massachusetts one of the hottest U.S. centers of big data.

To gain leverage from ever-improving technologies, companies need new processes and business models.

The second annual report by MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value sees a growing divide in analytic sophistication.

When Paul Barth and Randy Bean launched NewVantage Partners in 2000, most organizations were not paying a lot of attention to data and analytics. That's changed. As internal customers realize its value of data, the demand for access to the flood of accumulated data has risen almost as quickly as the issues of security and governance surrounding it. Though many organizations' analytics projects are CIO-driven, the partners have seen more success when organizations "start in the middle" with a "real tangible business problem." Solving something quickly, that gives quantifiable results, can help build a data management practice that ultimately influences the entire enterprise. Then organizations can begin to gain the kind of competitive advantage that analytics promises. Barth and Bean spoke with David Kiron, executive editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, about the importance of governance policies and structures, the role of culture in the success of initiatives, and the promise of value that many organizations are realizing from their analytics' innovations.

Companies experienced in analytics use are increasingly gaining competitive advantage.

How are companies using analytics in their decision making? To what extent are managers able to access the data they need? What are the key challenges, and how have the main business objectives changed? MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value teamed up to ask business executives, managers and analysts to reflect on the role data plays within their organizations, and received more than 4,000 responses, representing every major industry and every region of the world. Complete results of the second annual survey are scheduled for publication in the fall 2011 issue, but this article provides some preliminary findings. A few early results stand out: Only about four in 10 respondents have access to the information they want; almost one-fifth say they have limited or no access to the data they need to be successful. The three biggest challenges people cite in using analytics are the difficulties of "integrating internal data across silos," the time and cost of performing analytics and the lack of skills to interpret and leverage the data. While the top three business objectives organizations cite for using analytics have not changed since last year's survey, their order of importance has changed: Last year, respondents said the most important objective was "innovating to achieve competitive differentiation;" this year, the No. 1 priority is "growing revenue," followed by "reducing costs and increasing efficiencies." Innovating to achieve competitive differentiation fell to No. 3. All told, the 2011 survey contained 27 questions. The charts in this preview article represent the answers to just eight of those, presented as simple raw data, clean and uncut. In the complete report, the new information will be combined and refined and, in many cases, compared to last year's data to give readers a snapshot of what's changed since our initial survey and the opportunity to benchmark their organizations in relation to their peers.