Data is permeating every single aspect of our lives with increasing frequency and speed. From e-mails to cellphone chats to sales transaction reports, almost everything we do these days is converted to digital records and stored in databases.
In their book: "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work And Think", which was published earlier this year, authors Viktor Mayer-Sch"onberger and Kenneth Cukier try to give an indication of just how much data is already out there. They say the amount of stored information in the world in 2013 is estimated to be around 1 200 exabytes, of which less than 2% is non-digital.
As an example, to try and explain how much that is in a way that can be visualised, Mayer-Sch"onberger and Cukier write that, if it were all printed in books, it would cover the entire surface of the United States and be 52 layers thick.
But what happens to all that data? "Businesses are increasingly using analytics - which has been defined as the scientific process of examining and transforming data into meaningful patterns to generate insights - to help them make sense out of that data so that they can make informed, fact-based decisions, instead of just going on the CEO's gut-feel, appeasing the majority of the shareholders, or trying to guess what the customers might want," explains Gerald Naidoo, CEO of Logikal Consulting.
Research has shown that analytics is a powerful business tool and that companies that employ it have a definite leg up on their competitors. In 2010, researchers from MIT Sloan Management Review and technology company IBM found that organisations that used business information and analytics outperformed organisations that did not. It revealed that top-performing businesses were twice as likely to use analytics to guide future strategies and day-to-day operations compared to their low-performing counterparts.
According to a survey, conducted late last year by global management consultancy Accenture, the use of analytics in business is growing. The company polled 600 executives in the UK and US and found that the use of predictive analytics has nearly tripled to 33% since 2009. One-third of companies surveyed report that they are aggressively using analytics across the entire enterprise and fewer than 10% of respondents said their companies were not making any use of analytics. Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed executives said their senior management teams were highly or totally committed to analytics and fact-based decision-making. Two out of three companies have appointed a senior figure, such as a "chief data officer", to lead data management and analytics in the last 18 months, and among companies that have not made such an executive appointment, 71% said they expect to do so in the near future.
"Data is a totally honest, unbiased depiction of what is going on within a business. Analytics is the most efficient way to fit the pieces of the puzzle together," Naidoo concludes.
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