The last couple of years have been spent talking about the big new technology possibilities in the analytics market that hold out the promise of making decades of best practice obsolete. Now it’s time to put those technologies into action. As Doug Henschen of InformationWeek says in his recent article Big Data’s 2 Big Years:
“During the past two years, Hadoop hit the big time, in-memory arrived, and practitioners saw data analysis deliver real results.”
Unless you have the luxury of starting from scratch, installing your ERP on an in-memory, cloud-based system with full analytics of the same data without any duplication, it may be a long journey. But it’s worth it. Gartner surveys indicate that business intelligence and analytics remain CIOs’ top technology priority for 2014.
Although analytics remains one of the most difficult processes to get right, because it’s about much more than “just technology,” it’s easily the best IT investment you can make today.
Beware of any vendor that claims there’s an easy technology fix to your analytic needs, but now is the time to step away from your day-to-day wrestling with existing systems and take a strategic view of the new innovation options.
It’s no longer a question of if you will implement in-memory, Hadoop, unstructured analytics, mobile bi, and self-service data exploration, it’s simply a question of when.
Good luck!
