Business Analytics: Shifting Hindsight to Insight and Foresight

The biggest challenge we face with data analytics is not necessarily the technology, but a lack of focus on what we’re trying to accomplish.

A new study of 1,900 business and technology executives finds that one-third of them did not know if their organization used or had business analytics tools, and more than half said that overcoming the data silos was their top priority with business analytics.

In general, business people are just now waking up to the potential of data analytics after many of them were taken by surprise during the economic downturn. The challenge that IT people face, however, is not organizing the data, but presenting it in ways that are relevant to business users.

That ultimately may mean that instead of just managing data, the IT organization will to have to start running business reports themselves to show what can be done with analytics rather than waiting for business people to discover what to do with analytics software that in many cases they don’t even know they have.

Read more about this in Mike Vizard's blog post "IT and the Lost Data Analytics Opportunity."

Click through for results from a study conducted by Deloitte on business analytics usage.

Data warehousing and performance management are the most widely deployed.

Day-to-day operational efficiency is still the main goal.

Data analytics should be closely aligned with maximizing profitability.

There’s isn’t much consistency in most organizations.