It was informative and fun attending the IOD and IDUG conferences over the last couple of weeks. There were some great presentations at the IDUG and IOD conferences and I started to go through all of them while I was traveling back and forth from Prague and traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday. Some of the most informative presentations at the conferences were the ones that talked about are the IBM MIT studies.
These presentations talked about how everyone is using business analytics to make their business more profitable. One of the presentations that I saw talked about the analytics during the keynote session. They quoted results from Creating Business Value with Analytics by David Kiron and Rebecca Shockley from MIT that was finished this September 15th. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2011-fall/53112/creating-business-value-with-analytics
Another paper quoted was Analytics: The Widening Divide by MIT Sloan and IBM Research http://sloanreview.mit.edu/feature/achieving-competitive-advantage-through-analytics/. These reports talked about how corporations are using business analytics to create competitive advantages in their industries.
Analytics: The Widening Divide documented that 58% of organizations surveyed now use analytics to create a competitive advantage within the market. That statistic is up from 37% one year ago. A survey of over 4500 executives in 120 countries provided this data. One of the things that they found within the survey was that there were three main key competencies for adopting a business analytics environment: information management, analytic skills and tools and a data-oriented corporate culture.
These three competencies, information management, analytical skills and tools and a data-oriented culture, were vital for the adoption and use of analytics within these corporations.
It was interesting for the study to find in the survey that there were three types of corporations adopting these kinds of technologies within their corporate culture. The three types of analytical corporations were aspirational, experienced, and transformed.
First, the aspirational corporation is just starting out with business analytics and primarily using spreadsheets for their ad hoc analysis. The aspirational corporation is new to business analytics and the use of spreadsheets throughout their corporation assists them to execute day-to-day activities.
Next, the experienced business analytics corporation is beginning with a set portfolio of analytical tools. The analytics tools are used to work with in-line business units for developing metrics for their business unit processes. They use a growing focus on the business performance numbers providing cross training and hiring skills externally that will help them in their business analytics efforts. These experienced users have leadership and topline support of their business analytics processes. The experienced users made up 45% of the overall survey results.
The third group was the transformed corporations. This group is a group of strong and sophisticated users using enterprise data models to create integrated views of the business with a growing focus on unstructured data. The transformed corporations have a strong topline mandate to use business analytics within their business units and corporations. This develops and reinforces a corporate culture to support business analytics and opens the business to these new methodologies and skills. By using day to day business analytics to make operational and future strategies across the organization, these transformed corporations were much more profitable than the other types of corporations using business analytics: the experienced or the aspirational corporations.
As was quoted in the paper, “In a $112 billion company, Mckesson noted that even a 99.9 degree of accuracy can lead to the loss of more than $100 million.” By using analytics these transformed corporations are taking their business to the next level and saving huge amounts of money. So plan your 2012 data warehousing, performance activities to support the continued improvement and support of the core business of analytics and help your corporation save millions of dollars, too.
Finally, I am going to be presenting at the Midwest DB2 Users groups in the 4th quarter. I will be doing Minneapolis on December 6; Milwaukee, Wisconsin (http://www.wdug.com/) on December 7; and Chicago, Illinois (http://www.mwdug.org/) on December 8. I look forward to seeing everyone at the meetings to discuss all their plans for the 2012 year.
Come see me in any of these venues and ask me your DB2 performance or data warehouse performance questions.
Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at moc.ekluebevadnull@evad if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.
Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.
Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24
February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen
February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke
February 24: Two great seminars to choose from
Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen
or
DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke
http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/
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