One of the biggest challenges facing most businesses today has to do not necessarily with the quality of their data, but with the volume they’re being forced to wade through.
By as soon as 2020, there will be 1.7 megabytes of new data generated for every person on Earth every second. That same source estimates that the volume of data worldwide will continue to double every two years, reaching 40 ZB by the same time. In a study reported on by Forbes in 2018, 79% of enterprise executives at the time said that companies that didn’t find a way to embrace big data in spite of this were likely to lose their competitive position in the market. Some could even face total extinction.
As more professionals search for a solution to address these and similar types of issues in the most effective way possible, augmented analytics have quickly emerged as one of the most important trends to pay close attention to in 2019 and beyond.
What Are Augmented Analytics?
Data, on its own, is meaningless. It’s little more than a collection of 1s and 0s on a hard drive or server somewhere. To extract value from data, you need to be able to uncover the narrative hidden underneath all that raw information.
That’s what traditional business analytics and intelligence solutions are supposed to do, but even that is proving problematic. Too much data tends to create too much insight and again, things prove overwhelming almost immediately.
Augmented analytics, on the other hand, are the next evolution of that idea. It’s a way to take the insight extracted from all that data and turn it into something actionable by not only connecting it back to a business, but doing so in a direct way. If data tells you that sales are declining, that’s great – but you don’t necessarily know why. If you don’t know what caused the trend, you don’t necessarily know how to address it. Augmented analytics will help provide that context in the fastest way possible, connecting a problem to a reason to a solution that can help crystalize priorities for decision-makers everywhere.
Augmented analytics are not designed to replace data scientists or IT personnel. Instead, they’re supposed to empower them. This may very well be the biggest thing to understand about this entire concept. It’s not about removing the need for people. It’s about enabling those people to work “smarter, not harder.”
By bringing together data from various sources, data scientists or IT people no longer have to spend days or even weeks trying to make sense of it all. They no longer have to go looking for the cause of the problem that has been identified – it too has finally risen to the surface. At that point, those people can focus their attention on the tasks that really matter: namely, implementing the business solutions to those issues as soon as possible. In addition to making a significant, positive impact to return on investment and other concepts like total cost of ownership, augmented analytics ultimately create the most important benefit of all: better decisions that can be made with 100% confidence.
In the end, all of this leads to more actionable insight at a far faster rate than ever, putting the people in charge in a position to interpret and act on that insight in a far more accurate and forward-thinking way. With the Internet of Things poised to add countless devices to our professional lives in the not-too-distant future, it’s easy to see how this is one concept that is only going to get more important as time goes on.
Contact us today to discuss augmented analytics for your organization!
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