Here’s the executive summary from my white paper on Rethinking Analytics for the Social Enterprise developed with Mike Dover. SAP developed a great infographic capturing key points based on our webinar.
The practice of analytics is rapidly evolving. What was once the dominion of select analysts manipulating arcane, opaque spreadsheets based on data whose accuracy and timeliness were suspect, has now become a broader ecosystem where all team members (including participants from beyond the organizational walls) actively participate in collecting and acting upon information.
Today’s volatile business environment rewards those who can innovate the most quickly and respond accurately to changing consumer sentiment. The staggering amount of data being created is a daunting challenge—research suggests that 2.7 zettabytes (the amount of data in fifty million Libraries of Congress) of information will be created in 2012, an increase of more than 48% from 2011.1 The Social Revolution confirms the power of the individual voice and is leading to new collaborative business models where data is shared, analysed and treated differently. New analytics tools and capabilities are appearing in the marketplace.
Leading companies and technology providers are rethinking the fundamental model of analytics, and the contours of a new paradigm are emerging. The new generation of analytics goes beyond Big Data (information that is too large and complex to manipulate without robust software), and the traditional narrow approach of analytics which was restricted to analysing customer and financial data collected from their interactions on social media. Today companies are embracing the social revolution, using real-time technologies to unlock deep insights about customers and others and enable better-informed decisions and richer collaboration in real-time.
