At the SAP Insider BI2017 / HANA 2017 conference, Jag Bandla and Chris Dinkel shared the practical experiences of Deloitte customers in the market, and gave a preview of where things are going in the future.
Jag opened up the session talking about his personal experiences of doing analytics at Deloitte:
Over the last seventeen years I’ve done lots of operational reporting projects. And my takeaway is this: it doesn’t matter how many reports we build, unless that data actually gets acted upon.
And this can happen in two different ways. A sales person, say, can look at the data and figure out what to do do differently in the future. That’s what we mostly do.
But you can also take the data and really embed it in real time into business processes. Take the example of purchase orders. What typically happens today is that you choose a vendor in the system, and itemize what you want to buy.
But when you think about it, that’s the wrong way around! You should put in what you want to buy, and the system should use all the data available to figure out the best vendor, in real time…
Technology is just one aspect of getting it right. There are a lot of smart people in this room that can implement technology. But are we really thinking about what it means to the business when you embed analytics?
Jag and Chris covered the research around the top trends in IT for the “Kinetic Enterprise”. The first of the trends covered — IT unbounded — covered the transformation of IT into an open, agile, and cross-disciplinary operating and delivery model.
Deloitte does a lot of research into business satisfaction with IT, and the changing nature of the IT function.
The chart on the right shows some of the big gaps between what the business expects of IT organizations, and what it’s currently capable of delivering.
These gaps have driven the adoption of “shadow IT”, but Deloitte believes that the next phase of IT-business collaboration will dissolve the idea of shadow IT by fundamentally blurring the line between the two. Going forward, they should be be joint partners in the use of technology to operate a function or commercialize a product
Key recommendations to current IT leaders from Deloitte include:
- Earn business leaders trust (by embracing shadow IT, rather than ignoring it or fighting it)
- Liberate IT talent to focus on new tasks (by taking advantage of new technologies like SAP HANA to simplify)
- Establish an innovation council (for example, reach out to milennials in the organization)
- Escape your echo chamber (take a step back and reevaluate the belief systems that support the current IT environment)
Next the presenters covered the topic of Dark Analytics, the need to shine a light on video, audio, images, the dark web, and other sources of untapped data. The total size of the digital universe will be 44 Zettabytes by 2020 — ten times what it was in 2013.
Then Chris talked about the top trends in Machine Intelligence and the evolution of automation and the move from predictive to prescriptive analytics scenarios.
Robotic process automation — next big frontier of opportunity.
- Screen scraping data collection
- Rules-based business process management
- Tactical toolset to automate reptitive taks
- Cheaper and faster step towards process efficiency
Cognitive automation
- Data input and output in any format
- Pattern recognition within unstructured data
- Replication of judgment based tasks
- Basic learning capabilities for continuous improvements to quality and speed
Artificial intelligence
- Natural language recognition and processing
- Dealing with unstructured super data sets
- Hypotheses based predictive analysis
- Self-learning roles continuously rewritten to improve performance
Deloitte believes Mixed Reality is the future, with augmented reality virtual reality, and the internet of things. They have developed a solution is called Lens that is based on the SAP HANA technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-yH8G46CFM
The Inevitable Architecture section covered the modernizing of infrastructure and platforms through containerization, standards, and autonomics.
“Cloud is inevitable. I don’t think organizations can survive without getting into the cloud game and having a cloud strategy.”
The real benefit of cloud is driving fast innovation. For example, Deloitte offers to take a copy of your production system, move it to S/4HANA in the cloud, and build a business case in four days — “no excuses are valid anymore.”
The final section covered the API Economy, with new “EAAS” (everything as as service) models, where products and services are sold on a utility basis.
To get more information about any of these trends, take a look the Deloitte TechTrends 2017 web site for more reports and research.
