Analytics - tell me something I didn't know
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Companies that fail to exploit critical customer intelligence – inevitably involving social media – do so at their peril, according to a couple of recent case studies. It seems self-evident – so why does the evidence look less than impressive?

The research comes from a company called Trovus, which specialises in helping business-to-business clients who sell higher value products and services. Looking at traffic from hundreds of organisations across the websites of one technology company and one legal firm, the research concluded that many companies are “data rich but insight poor”.

Few would probably quarrel with that assessment. But the insights that Trovus’s research cites as exemplars are scarcely earth-shattering.

One case study showed falling levels of interest in the Cloud among the financial services and education vertical markets – which Trovus puts down to redundancies and the summer months respectively. Well, yes.

In another, the results showed a huge increase in the summer in interest in the European Union Agency Workers Directive, except in the public sector where it fell away – again hardly surprising as it was due to come into force in the United Kingdom on 1 October, but the public sector was probably better prepared anyway and also rather preoccupied with cuts.

The influential Economist newspaper seemed similarly cautious about some of the claims made for the ability of analytics to turn data into insight when it illustrated a recent article with a graphic of an analysis of tweets that appeared to show that “people love beer”. “Most tweets are inane, but a million may contain valuable information”, the Economist suggests; yes – but that information may still turn out to be commonplace.

Yet analytics continue to be held up as a panacea, to judge from the furious pace with which information firms are rushing to equip themselves with analytical capabilities – recent LiveWire coverage here (October) and here (September). Meanwhile Gartner’s ranking list of top strategic technologies for 2012 indicates that analytics are about to enter the next generation.

The transition from offline to in-line embedded analytics will gather momentum, it predicts, as will the shift from emphasis on historical data to analysing real-time data from multiple sources for predictive purposes. It will also mature from structured and simple data analysed by individuals to analysis of complex information from many media, supporting collaborative decision-making by lots of brainstorming people.

No doubting the increased processing power that is on the way – but insight surely comes from the warm-bodied ability to spot patterns, parallel developments, the counter-cyclical and counter-intuitive, straws in the wind and the likelihood of backlash. It remains to be seen whether the insights gained from advanced analytics simply become subject to the law of diminishing returns.

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