Monday, January 20, 2014

Trend #4: Follow the Money, Business-led Tech Innovation Will Disrupt and Drive Growth

Four Trends That Will Shape 2014 

From my many travels and conversations in 2013, I've synthesized four primary trends that I believe
will make 2014 a transformative year for reporting and analytics. Think of this as my travel log and diary distilled into a short, easily readable series of blog posts. I invite you to follow this short series through my first, second and third installments and now my fourth (and final) below.  Your comments and ideas will surely help shape not only my perspective on the future of reporting and analytics, but Jaspersoft's product priorities as well. I look forward to the on-going dialog and I thank our customers and partners for their business and partnership, which mean everything to us.

Putting more data to work drives innovation.  Innovation can transform processes, products, services and people. Our newfound ability to cost-effectively analyze and find hidden patterns in huge swaths of data will enable a new generation of business-led technology innovation.  With this trend, the IT organization must find new ways to integrate and collaborate within the enterprise, becoming an enabler of business-led innovation.  This collaboration is more important than ever as technology now defines the new economic battleground for every industry and organization.  Even Gartner’s latest predictions abound with a Digital Industrial Revolution theme and watchwords for CIOs and their IT organizations to either lead or get out of the way.  It’s a bold new world.

All companies are now technology companies.  Every organization must put technology to work in ways that create distinction and competitive advantage.  Evidence of this trend can be found in any industry-leading company today, where IDC says that business units already control 61% of tech spending.  Fortunately, the technological barriers to entry have never been lower.  Organizations of all sizes now have affordable access to powerful, enterprise tools, which levels the playing field, allowing even small companies to compete with the big guys (sometimes even more effectively, because of their nimbleness).  One example is AirIT, which can help every airport become a technology-enabled data center, driven by metrics relevant to the business, which in turn, streamline operations and save money.

Leading enterprises will overtly staff, skill and organize to maximize innovative uses of technology – creating a cascade that will impact education, training and personnel management in all corners of the organization.  Even military organizations realize that gaining skill and expertise in data and analytics will remain at the forefront for personal advancement.  The risk for all is that a concentration of even deeper technology skills will create digital haves and have-nots within industries, creating a difficult spiral for laggards.

Lastly, in order for business-led tech innovation to really flourish, many more knowledge workers (than today) must have access to just the right amount of data and analysis, at the right place and the right time (not too much, not too little), which promises to make everyone into a more capable analyst and decision maker (regardless of job level, title and even skill).  In 2014, analytics becomes a thing that you do, not a place that you go and the need for intelligence inside of the applications and business processes we use every day becomes an agent of business-led tech innovation.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Trend #3: From Schema-Constrained to Idea-Constrained, The Real Big Data Opportunity

From my many travels and conversations in 2013, I've synthesized four primary trends that I believe
will make 2014 a transformative year for reporting and analytics.  Think of this as my travel log and diary distilled into a short, easily readable series of blog posts.  I invite you to follow this short series through my first and second installments and now my third below. Your comments and ideas will surely help shape not only my perspective on the future of reporting and analytics, but Jaspersoft's product priorities as well.  I look forward to the on-going dialog and I thank our customers and partners for their business and partnership, which mean everything to us.

Trend #3:  From Schema-Constrained to Idea-Constrained, The Real Big Data Opportunity

In the past (and too often today), we collected just the data that we could afford to store and for which we had a clear, known use.  In this sense, we were hard-wired to winnow the data down to its most obvious and practical subset; thus, we were (and are) schema-constrained. By this I mean that today we must know, in advance, the uses for data as they are being captured.  This mindset leaves little-to-no room for future, latent value that may exist within a data set.  In physics, we recognize that energy has an immediate value (kinetic) and a future value (latent).  Why should data be any different?  

As costs have declined and the power of technology has increased exponentially, we now have the ability to store and use ALL of the data, not just some of the data. But, we may not always know the value of this data while it is being captured.  That’s okay.  The latent value of data will become more obvious each year and the technology now exists for this to be the norm.  In this sense, the real big data opportunity is based on the scale of our ideas to put data to work, finding new correlation and value where it previously was not discernible.  

Unlocking this new value becomes easier as the world is increasingly digitized; that is, we now regularly put very new data types to work:  geo-position / location, sensor updates, click streams, videos and pictures, documents and forms, etc.  Just a few years ago, almost none of this would have been considered “data”. Commonly using all these new data types and searching for correlations that can positively impact business will shift the primary constraint to the quality and quantity of our ideas.  

Perhaps my favorite example of latent data use is the world’s first consumer light field camera from Lytro.  The Lytro camera captures and processes the entire light field (11 million rays of light, to be precise).  This allows every shot to be filtered and viewed from any perspective, after the shot, allowing the user to later uncover what the best focus, angle, and zoom, might yield.  Lytro refers to the result as a “living picture” with a 3-dimensional feel.  What a beautiful use of big, latent data.

In 2014, we’ll move from being schema-constrained to idea-constrained, more often finding the real value in Big Data.

Monday, January 6, 2014

Trend #2: Cloud-Based Delivery Will Change The Analytics Consumption Pattern

From my many travels and conversations in 2013, I've synthesized four primary trends that I believe
will make 2014 a transformative year for reporting and analytics. Think of this as my travel log and diary distilled into a short, easily readable series of blog posts. I invite you to follow this short series with my first installment here and my second below.  Your comments and ideas will surely help shape not only my perspective on the future of reporting and analytics, but Jaspersoft's business intelligence product priorities as well.  I look forward to the on-going dialog and I thank our customers and partners for their business and partnership, which mean everything to us.

As cloud-originated data growth accelerates, the attractiveness of using additional cloud-based data management and analysis services will grow too. I’ve previously written about an entirely new generation of platform and middleware software that will emerge to satisfy the new set of cloud-based, elastic compute needs within organizations of all sizes.  Commonly at this software layer, utility-based pricing and scalable provisioning models will be chosen to more strictly match consumption patterns
with fees paid.  These improved economics, in turn, will enable broader use of platform and middleware software, especially reporting and analytics, than ever before possible.  

Additionally, cloud-based delivery portends a level of simplicity and ease-of-use (consumer-like services) that defies the earlier generation of enterprise software, ushering in deeper consumption of analytics by organizations of all sizes.  In short, cloud-based delivery becomes a key component of the quest for pervasive analytics – especially when those analytics are delivered as components within the web applications we use every day.

According to Nucleus Research: “As companies learn to take full advantage of the analytics functionalities that are now available with utility and subscription-based pricing options, they will continue to become more able to take advantage of market trends and opportunities before their peers and take advantage of the average return of $10.66 for every dollar spent in analytics.” In 2014, cloud-based delivery will change the analytics consumption pattern.