Cartoon: The Problem With Most Analytics

The problem with most analytics projects is that they just don’t react fast enough, in two different ways.

First, information isn’t available in real time. This is fine if you’re facing the same situation time and time again, and you can use past data to improve your future performance. But today’s challenges are becoming ever more dynamic, where past history doesn’t help tell you what’s going to happen next — for example, imagine trying to play tennis if you could only see the ball once it had gone past you!

New HTAP (hybrid transactional/analytic processing) systems store information just once, in memory, where it’s immediately available for sophisticated analysis. Combined with powerful predictive algorithms, such systems not only let you see the ball faster, you can also start moving to where the ball is going to be…

Second, the analytics systems themselves aren’t agile enough to react to changing business needs. Companies need to implement “trusted data discovery” systems that let business people access new information fast and flexibly, while meeting the governance needs of the organization as a whole. This typically means that BI organizations have to change to provide a more collaborative governance environment between business and users.