Over the last several years, data analytics has become a driving force for organizations wanting to make informed decisions about their businesses and their customers.
With further advancements in open source analytic tools, faster storage and database performance and the advent of sensors and IoT, IDC predicts the big data analytics market is on track to become a $200 billion industry by the end of this decade.
Many organizations now understand the value of extracting relevant information from their enterprise data and using it for better decision-making, superior customer service and more efficient management. But to realize their highest potential in this space, organizations will have to evolve from being "data-driven” to being “information-driven.” While these two categories might sound similar, they’re actually quite different.
In order to make a data-driven decision, a user must somehow find the data relevant to a query and then interpret it to resolve that query. The problem with this approach is there is no way to know the completeness and accuracy of the data found in any reliable way.
Being information-driven means having all of the relevant content and data from across the enterprise intelligently and securely processed into information that is contextual to the task at hand and aligned with the user’s goals.
An information-driven approach is ideal for organizations in knowledge-intensive industries such as life sciences and finance where the number and volume of data sets are increasing and arriving from diverse sources. The approach has repeatedly proven to help research and development organizations within large pharmaceutical companies connect experts with others experts and knowledge across the organization to accelerate research, lab tests and clinical trials to be first to market with new drugs.
Or think of maintenance engineers working at an airline manufacturer trying to address questions over an unexpected test procedure result. For this, they need to know immediately the particular equipment configuration, the relevant maintenance procedures for that aircraft and whether other cases with the same anomaly are known and how they were treated. They don’t have time to “go hunting” for information. The information-driven approach draws data from multiple locations, formats and languages for a complete picture of the issue at hand.
In the recent report, “Insights-Driven Businesses Set the Pace for Global Growth,” Forrester Research notes organizations that use better data to gain business insights will create a competitive advantage for future success. They are expected to grow at an average of more than 30 percent each year, and by 2020 are predicted to take $1.8 trillion annually from their less-informed peers.
To achieve this level of insight, here are several ways to evolve into an information-driven organization.
To be information-driven, organizations must have a comprehensive view of information and understand its meaning. If it were only about fielding queries and matching on keywords, a simple indexing approach would suffice.
The best results are obtained when multiple indexes are combined, each contributing a different perspective or emphasis.
