Analysts to Explore Analytics Capabilities at the Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit 2014, October 21-22 in Munich, Germany

Gartner, Inc. today said advanced analytics is a top business priority, fuelled by the need to make advanced analysis accessible to more users and broaden the insight into the business. Advanced analytics is the fastest-growing segment of the business intelligence (BI) and analytics software market and surpassed $1 billion in 2013.

"While advanced analytics have existed for over 20 years, big data has accelerated interest in the market and its position in the business," said Alexander Linden, research director at Gartner. "Rather than being the domain of a few select groups (for example, marketing, risk), many more business functions now have a legitimate interest in this capability to help foster better decision making and improved business outcomes."

IT and business leaders must expand their efforts to move their organizations from using only traditional BI that addresses descriptive analysis (what happened) to advanced analytics, which complements by answering the "why," the "what will happen," and "how we can address it" (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Four Types of Analytics Capability

Source: Gartner (October 2014)

"While basic analytics provide a general summary of data, advanced analytics deliver deeper data knowledge and granular data analysis," added Mr. Linden. The rewards of data-driven decision making can be a powerful boost to business outcomes. For example, clinical diagnosis applications apply analytics across a range of structured and unstructured sources - including electronic health records data, drug information, study data, and others - to recommend optimal treatment plans for individual patients.

However, creating value from data requires a range of talents, from data integration and preparation, to architecting specialized computing/database environments, to data mining and intelligent algorithms. "Extracting value out of data is not a trivial task," said Mr. Linden. "One of the key elements of any such 'making sense out of data' program is the people, who must have the right skills and capabilities." 

Data scientists in the organization support big data initiatives for which the No. 1 use case is enhancing customer experience. According to Gartner's latest global big data survey conducted in 2014*, 68 per cent of respondents said that they use big data to enhance their customer experience. This is the third year customer experience has been a top business problem to address. 

"Data scientists are not business analytics," said Mr. Linden. "They are professionals with the capability to derive mathematical models from data to reap clear and hard-hitting business benefits. They need to network well across different business units and work at the intersection of business goals, constraints, processes, available data and analytical possibilities." 

Ultimately, data science is inevitable as it can help extract various kinds of knowledge from data, for example, how to acquire new customers (database marketing), how to do more cross-selling (via propensity-to-purchase modeling) and information on route optimization, drug design and demand or failure prediction. 

"Whether an organization calls the role "data scientist" or something else, individuals (or teams of professionals) with these core skills and soft skills will prove essential in maximizing the realized value of your information assets, and discovering opportunities for enhanced business performance and competitive advantage," said Mr. Linden. 

Mr. Linden will further discuss key trends and technologies in advanced analytics at the Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit 2014, October 21-22 in Munich, Germany. More information about the Summit is available at http://events.gartner.com/en/Summit/EU/business-intelligence/BIADE1/home/index. 

Additional information from the event will be shared on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc and using #GartnerBI.

Contacts
  • Janessa Rivera
  • Gartner
  • janessa.rivera@gartner.com
  • Rob van der Meulen
  • Gartner
  • rob.vandermeulen@gartner.com
About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. We deliver the technology-related insight necessary for our clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, we are the valuable partner to clients in over 9,000 distinct enterprises worldwide. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, USA, and has 6,400 associates, including more than 1,480 research analysts and consultants, and clients in 85 countries.www.gartner.com.

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