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Maturing data science

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17 November 2014

When that venerable centurion-plus IBM reorganises itself into three primary lines of business, one of which is Big Data, it is clear that analytics has not only come of age but is eminently marriageable. Big Data is simply the pop jargon for digital analytics (except perhaps for the quietly smiling storage sector) and it is not only at an adult stage but its marriage prospects are positively polygamous. Every major advanced sector is already using analytics in some form, from government and intelligence to healthcare. Financial services and retailing have been in the game for a long time and their appetite for ever-smarter — and ever faster — analysis is insatiable.

We marry technical analytical capability with business value on a day to day basis, by pulling together literally millions of data points from all round the world here in Dublin. We transform and consolidate that data, analyse it and play the results back into our organisation. For clients, the practical end takes the form of dashboard and tailored reports, often customised for specific users or markets,” Constantin Biere, ACIA

We marry technical analytical capability with business value on a day to day basis, by pulling together literally millions of data points from all round the world here in Dublin. We transform and consolidate that data, analyse it and play the results back into our organisation. For clients, the practical end takes the form of dashboard and tailored reports, often customised for specific users or markets, Constantin Biere, ACIA

Analytics may be adult but, just like humans, this does not necessarily imply maturity. On the other hand, IBM is already making sales of $16 billion annually in analytics and related products and services. That is a reasonable share of the IDC estimated $37 billion current revenue from business analytics, which is shared with other market leaders like SAP, SAS, Oracle, Microsoft and a handful of others. It should also be acknowledged that there are other sectors using advanced analytics, notably in all of the sciences and in intelligence/security.

Growth Area
The salient point is that analytics is probably the major growth area of ICT. Analytics-assisted decision making is now standard at both the strategic and operational levels in the industries already mentioned. In fact we are already seeing semi-automated decision making in many sectors, notably banking credit and gambling. Your credit score has been pertinent for many years but the verdict on your application used to be delivered by a human face. Experience, relationships, intuition and hunches have been inexorably supplanted by the algorithms. An interesting thought is that perhaps all of those human judgements have actually been pushed to a higher level: automated systems can bounce your direct debit but only humans will lend your business a few million Euros.

Centres for analytics
Ireland Inc. has not been slow to set about exploiting the opportunity. There is already a significant body of third level research bodies and academic-industry collaboration in the field, notably the Insight Centre for Data Analytics and CeADAR, the Centre for Applied Data Analytics. In the private sector, Accenture has invested in a centre of excellence for business analytics here while insurance giant Aon established its Centre for Innovation and Analytics (ACIA) here with a global mission in 2009. Five years later it has over 90 staff making it the biggest such centre in Ireland — and is still hiring — although Insight brings together the work of over 200 researchers.

ACIA is a specialist centre, serving the global Aon organisation and its thousands of clients and intermediary partners in the key area of risk management. “In a world where we see risks becoming increasingly complex and volatile, there is increasing value for risk managers in fact-based data to assess risk and market conditions,” says ACIA managing director Constantin Biere.

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