Johannesburg, 22 May 2017
In the past decade, there's been a lot of talk, hype and promise around the subject of self-service business intelligence (BI) and the analytics that are bundled with this. However, despite all the discourse around this subject, there remains a broad misconception within business of what these BI tools and analytics are actually capable of delivering.
The real trouble, says Craig Stephens, principle business solutions manager for information management and analytics at SAS Africa, is that many companies are labouring under the mistaken belief that the analytics provided by these pure play BI vendors will be sufficient to meet their needs going forward.
"What many organisations fail to grasp is that the tools offered by these BI vendors are little more than prescriptive analytics. In other words, they lack the ability to take any insights gleaned and use these to improve the business, because they are effectively looking backwards," he explains.
"SAS, on the other hand, focuses on predictive analytics, which provide a forward-facing analysis instead. This allows businesses to take this knowledge and embed it into their operational systems ahead of time, enabling them to cut costs and maintain their competitive edge."
Stephens points out that in a recent survey it conducted focused on the concept of operationalising analytics, SA remains rooted near the bottom when it comes to this approach, particularly when compared to developed nations like the US and those in Europe.
"The report also indicated that the country is near the bottom in respect of implementing or planning to implement advanced analytics tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). While this clearly indicates that there is a lot that we need to do as a market, it is obviously an exciting time for us at SAS, as we are well positioned to assist in this regard."
"It certainly appears as though the market is increasingly taking note of the advanced tools that are out there, although many are still unsure how to get to the point where they can implement these."
As an example of this interest, he points out that data science communities are springing up around the country, such as the recently launched African Data Science Association and the African Data Science Forum.
"This is just one indication that there is a lot happening in this space, but the reality is that while the ideas are there and the people are mostly there, the execution remains a challenge. This is at least partly due to the fact that significant investment is required to implement these advanced analytics tools, and some organisations have not yet managed to balance the investment versus return business case."
Nonetheless, he remains confident that things are starting to change in a local context. More organisations are starting to make investments in the technology and taking leaps of faith with regard to analytics, he suggests.
"This is being driven by couple of things. The first is an increasing amount of and greater access to open source development technologies. This is a huge driver, as there have been a lot of advances in open source related to machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Another primary driver is the move to the cloud, which makes it easier to spin up a Hadoop platform and test things out in the virtual world."
In other words, despite the negative assessment of the survey, Stephens believes things are starting to happen, suggesting that within the next 12 to 18 months, SA will see the establishment of more formalised structures related to advanced analytics.
"In particular, this will help to change the common perception that analytics is simply about helping your business to solve a problem, when the reality is that is about assisting you to operationalise the insights you have gained," he concludes.
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