Mobile, Social and Big Data Tech to Drive Actionable Analytics

Gartner's report identified key trends for analytics and BI professionals to consider in 2013.

Less than one-third (30 percent) of potential users in an organization adopt CIO-sponsored analytics tools, despite the fact that business intelligence and analytics continues to be a top CIO investment priority, according to a report by IT research firm Gartner.

The growing volume of real-time data and the reduced time for decision making are driving companies to implement real-time operational intelligence systems that make supervisors and operations staff more effective, suggesting organizations should offload event data capture, filtering, mathematical calculations and pattern detection to real-time operational intelligence software to provide better situation awareness to business people.

"A large enterprise makes millions of decisions every day," Gartner Research Vice President Rita Sallam said in a statement. "The challenge is that companies have far more data than people have time, and the amount of data that is generated every minute keeps increasing.

"In the face of accelerating business processes and a myriad of distractions, real-time operational intelligence systems are moving from 'nice to have' to 'must have for survival.' The more pervasively analytics can be deployed to business users, customers and consumers, the greater the impact will be in real time on business activities, competitiveness, innovation and productivity," she said.

Gartner identified key trends for analytics and business intelligence (BI) professionals to consider in 2013, including making analytics more invisible and transparent to their users in order to help make analytics more actionable and pervasively deployed. The report said the friendlier, more transparent and therefore more invisible the analytics are to users, the more broadly they will be adopted--particularly by users that have never used BI tools--and the greater the impact analytics can have on business activities.

Despite the positive impact operational intelligence software and decision management software technologies can have on organizations, the report pointed out solutions architects should work with business analysts, subject matter experts and business managers to develop an understanding of the kinds of business decisions that will be made and let computers make decisions that are structured and repeatable to conserve people's time and attention for the thinking and actions that computers cannot do.

“Companies are under pressure to improve the quality of their decisions, while reducing their staffing and complying with ever-increasing regulation to make decisions transparent, auditable and repeatable,” the report said. “These forces are motivating managers to use decision management software technologies in more places, and also to use more sophisticated forms of these technologies. Decision management software runs on-demand when a person or an application program needs computational support for making a decision.”