Being keenly interested and attuned to the whirlwinds of global change, the RTi teams are continually in touch with and focus our thinking on a wide spectrum of information and opinion covering business, consumer and insight/research industry trends. Our goal: to be as context-knowledgeable, insightful, and “ahead of the curve” as we can to better serve and guide our clients.
In that spirit, we were drawn to an article in a recent Gartner, Inc. Newsroom posting on the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo (Orlando, October 2014). At the symposium, David Cearley, vice president & Gartner Fellow, noted that “we have identified the top 10 technology trends that organizations cannot afford to ignore in their strategic planning processes”.
Cearley’s perspective on all 10 trends is certainly worth reading. But there is one that especially resonated with us, perhaps because it echoes our philosophy on answers, insights, and cultural context voiced in one of our 2014 blogs.
Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics is one of the accelerating, potentially overwhelming technology trends highlighted by Cearley. With the veritable tidal waves of diverse information, much of it driven by the Big Data phenomenon, he envisions “invisible” analytics linked to the data surge at virtually every organization level.
Advanced and pervasive analytics…maybe, but invisible analytics? The hidden danger is in giving in to the “what”; relinquishing too much responsibility for business decisions to the data itself!
As Cearley suggests and as we pointed out in our blog six months ago on Big Data (Refining Data for Business Insight and Activation), the challenge will increasingly be to refocus business orientation away from the data deluge itself and onto answers to the questions being asked.
At RTi, there are no “invisible analytics”
We and the clients who engage us are aligned in the knowledge that the key to uncovering opportunities and insights that shape successful strategies lies in revealing the “whys” within the data. So the increasing volume and velocity of available data is not an end in and of itself, but an enabler to better understanding of the drivers of business outcomes.