Consulting with clients a few years ago, I would have placed quite an emphasis on the need to distinguish between real-time data and right-time data. If your business processes could be served with hourly updates, why deploy expensive real-time analytics tools to deliver them every few seconds? You simply won't notice that the data has been updated thousands of times if you only check your dashboard once an hour.
That was a valuable point to make then. But, while it certainly is still interesting to consider what right-time may mean, business truly moves more rapidly now. Right-time is, increasingly, real-time. To keep pace, more organizations are making that investment in real-time data analytics so data is available to be analyzed, interpreted and visualized as it is created or changes in their source systems.
With such issues in mind, what are the business benefits of real-time data for analytics applications and other uses? Here are six of the top ones.
1. Make decisions at the speed of your business Much of what we do in the world of data management, BI and analytics -- even with the latest data science and advanced analytics tools -- still falls under the rubric of that old term decision support. It's a good descriptor: the software supports you in making better decisions. As I suggested above, better decisions do need to be faster decisions as the pace of business increases. When even modest businesses are trading globally online, it's not good enough to wait for an overnight data management process to reconcile the data warehouse in order to deliver standardized reports. Business teams working remotely or internationally need the best information continuously, more often delivered in a dashboard with immediate insights. So, the first -- and for many the primary -- benefit of real-time data in the enterprise is simply being able to support decisions whenever and wherever they need to be made.
It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that faster decision-making means a more agile business. But in fact, business agility isn't only about decisions -- agility also encompasses your strategic and tactical business goals. Choosing between options quickly doesn't help when you should be making choices of a different kind. The business benefits of real-time analytics initiatives include these items. One approach to business agility that has proven very successful in several industry sectors is the creation of small, well-informed, tightly focused teams called squads. For example, retailers may use squads to focus on produce, home goods or other specific merchandise categories, empowering them to quickly and directly make decisions that previously might have involved considerable management review. Manufacturers may have squads that focus on maintenance or safety. By giving squads a mandate to act quickly so close to your operations, you enable faster and -- hopefully -- smarter responses to a changing business environment. However, this approach can only be effective if a squad has the needed data, which must continuously be kept up to date to match the team's urgency. That's a great use case for real-time data.
Squads started in the tech industry but have proven popular in sectors from retail to telecom and even, recently, healthcare -- all businesses facing rapidly changing markets and cost pressures, always with an eye to their profit margins. You don't necessarily need a squad to improve business operations with real-time data. Using data from IoT sensors or video feeds to monitor production lines for stoppages and backlogs and run predictive maintenance applications has been popular for several years now. It is a classic example of real-time operational improvement in action and has proven very effective at reducing downtime in manufacturing plants. Similar approaches can be applied in quite different scenarios.
