“Certain industries that are very data driven have done better in terms of realising the hype than others, most notably in manufacturing, logistics and transportation, online gaming and so on. Businesses in those sectors are investing ahead of the curve and seeing interesting results.”
Cloud power
According to Coughlan, the kind of processing power necessary to do serious analytics work is most commonly located in the cloud, which also means it’s easily accessible to all and can be used by anyone with the right data sets and motivation. It also means that it only needs to be paid for during the duration of the project.
“So it’s becoming more available, people are seeing the value in it and if anything there is more a skills gap restricting it than anything else. There is talk in the industry at the moment that the role of data scientist is the best paid job in IT and that may well be true,” he said.
“We see engineering graduates being snapped up wholesale by many companies and in reality the question being asked by those organisations looking at analytics is can they get the expertise to do it? It’s not affordability because it’s available through cloud services on demand, regardless of the size of the data set.”
“It’s not a lack of data because you can store your own data or acquire publicly available data sets for this purpose. It doesn’t even need to be particularly clean data because big data allows you to bring structured and unstructured data together.”
Full impact
With most technologies, the people who create it rarely see the full impact their invention will have in advance, and it is only when technologies become adopted on a broad scale that their full impact becomes visible. Coughlan contends that this is the case with big data and analytics.
“I’m aware of companies that are reducing customer churn, predicting customer behaviour and delivering efficiencies into supply chains, all through deep analytics, and they’re doing it in creative ways. We recently took the prediction engines that are behind a lot of these analytical services and created APIs to allow people to create bots. We’re making that openly available to people – it’s in preview now as part of Microsoft Cortana Intelligence – and that will open up a whole new range of innovative approaches to intelligence.”
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