Data from personal health monitors, airplane/car mechanical sensors, location movement instrumentation, image processes, and voice prints audio analysis are exploding databases in all aspects of business. Examining your current environments and systems shows there are many ways to enhance your business analytics as the business changes. While there are many techniques to develop analytics, the following four have been great for developing new analytic techniques and types.
- Catalog, count, and enhance your current analytics. Most businesses are evaluating their costs, sales and operations with a variety of analytics. Inventory the analytics you already have, including their reports, web interfaces, and ad hoc parameters to determine their capabilities.
Evaluate their usage, the business measurements they produce, and their impact on business operations and systems. Through evaluating your existing analytics landscape, your company can understand what insights of aspects of the business it has and which aspects it does not currently monitor. - Discover and enhance your business’s sensor capabilities. Once you determine the data not evaluated in your analytics efforts, you can begin to develop new criteria for these business areas. This is vital to determine how these new business insights can lead to greater efficiencies and better business profitability.
Sometimes analysis of business areas reveals that more sensors or reporting needs to be done to track a new area of the business. New information gathered from GPS sensors on warehouse vehicles, temperature sensors, and social network sentiment are just some of the ways new data can all be helpful to greater comprehension of positive, negative, and profitable business opportunities. - Leverage image analytics into your business processes. The IT environment continues to evolve with the incorporation of images within processing. The grocery store’s use of bar codes and QR codes is the simplest examples. Analytics of medical x-rays, aerial images, bar codes, and other images are only beginning to be incorporated into standard business processing and analytics. Facial recognition, property surveillance, and security-encoded images provide an extra layer to visually verify identities, property and documents.
The incorporation of aerial photography and drone imaging into data processing systems has only just begun. Has your company incorporated images into your everyday processing? Where can it be effective to optimize activities and are there analytics to measure the effectiveness? Your competition is leveraging images already. What is your company doing to compete? - Augment your operational procedures with audio analytic capabilities. There are new audio analytics that are being deployed to monitor all types of activities. Audio surveillance of property to alert security, engine operational sound analysis, and gunshot acoustics to pinpoint city gun fire for directing police to the proper location are some of the early examples of audio being incorporated into processes and procedures.
Some websites are using video more in their web pages to improve user interaction with their website. How long on average are your customer service representatives on the phone? Why did the phone air time drop suddenly? Was there a new management directive or new self-help website or training tutorial webpage? Audio analysis of key words or phrases in customer service conversations are providing more in-depth audio analytics.
If you don’t capture data to measure a situation, your company can not detail the new business cost or improve its efficiency. Developing, discovering, and analyzing new aspects within your existing systems and incorporation of new unstructured data types into the everyday procedures are great to improve your bottom line business analytics.
Dave Beulke is a system strategist, application architect, and performance expert specializing in Big Data, data warehouses, and high performance internet business solutions. He is an IBM Gold Consultant, Information Champion, and President of DAMA-NCR, former President of International DB2 User Group, and frequent speaker at national and international conferences. His architectures, designs, and performance tuning techniques help organization better leverage their information assets, saving millions in processing costs.
Also I look forward to seeing everyone at the IBM Insight (formerly Information on Demand-IOD conference). I will be presenting “SQL Performance for a Big Data 22 Billion Row Data Warehouse” on Tuesday at 11:15. Please stop by and hear 30 SQL Tips and Big Data design considerations that can help you with your Big Data systems. For more details go here (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/events/insight/).
Support IDUG through the European IDUG conference in Prague, CR November 9-14. For more details go to www.idug.org.
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