Deloitte 2016 Trends Study Finds Analytics Essential for IT Success

Effective use of analytics is essential in delivering insights that help achieve new levels of innovation and value.

Last year’s super-trend remains front and center, and it continues to grow in importance as enterprises experience the losses in value and reputation that can result from a security breach. We’re not only talking about protecting data; product design and other intellectual property are also vulnerable to theft and sabotage. The problem is likely to grow as cyber-criminals become more skilled at infiltrating technology architectures and systems that weren’t designed from the ground up through a security lens.

The worldwide financial services industry was projected to spend $27.4 billion on information security in the last year (according to IDC). These organizations are beginning to employ more predictive approaches to threat intelligence and monitoring, which may mean automated scanning of Internet “chatter” by far-flung groups and individuals who may intend cyber-harm or analyzing past hacks and breaches to create predictive models for tomorrow’s threats.

Smart companies are realizing that analytical talent is critical to their success and in short supply, but more than 40 percent struggle with finding the talent they need (source: 2015 MIT Sloan Management Review). In fact, businesses need more than 1.5 million new data scientists to operate at peak efficiency.

The era of smart machines is upon us; analysts project that businesses will spend more than $60 billion on cognitive solutions by 2025 (source: IDC). However, leading businesses will use humans to add value to these smart machines. Some human talent will have to build and implement cognitive technologies, while others will ensure that those technologies are performing well. Still others will complement computers in roles machines cannot perform well, such as those involving high levels of creativity or empathy.

The Internet of things (IoT) is starting a new era of innovation. It is rapidly evolving from the realm of interesting gadgets to include tracking people as “things” to form new business models and influence people’s behaviors. This innovation is taking place in both consumer-focused and business-to-business industries and it has significant implications for business models and industry.

In the 2000s, it was called the triumph of the nerds. In the 2010s, it may be the triumph of the scientists. Deloitte Analytics sees a significant shift in how scientists are used within companies, and an increasing number of them are leading companies. This trend is poised to reshape the competitive landscape and the way managers work.

Business leaders are beginning to take serious steps toward the insight-driven organization (IDO), which goes beyond the selective use of insights to fuel decision-making in individual parts of the business. It deploys a tightly knit combination of strategy, people, processes and data to drive competitive advantage and improved operations.

Leading companies are embracing the need to embed analytics as a core capability and are working to get ahead of these trends, said Deloitte’s U.S. Analytics Leader Forrest Danson. “By using analytics to deliver insights at the point of action every day, insight-driven organizations can achieve a deeper understanding of complex issues, make more meaningful decisions, and create more value,” Danson said.