The Challenges of Introducing Predictive Analytics to Your Organization
Posted: Saturday, November 07, 2009
by Victor Holman
Lifecycle Performance Professionals
Predictive analytics is a solution used by many businesses today to gain more value out of the large amounts of raw data by applying techniques that are used to predict future behaviors within an organization, it's customer base, it's products and services. Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from data mining, stastics and game theory that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events.
The perceived complexity is the largest challenge facing executives today. The cost of implementation is a close second. While these are legitimate fears, many tools are being developed to simplify the process and establish transparency from the complex formulas and statical modeling. It is, however, up to organizations to educate themselves on the basics and concepts of predictive analysis in order to fully utilize these tools.
Another challenge, which is more technical, is the traditional approach of having analyst explore data sets by saving data and manually applying relationships in order to make predictive assumptions. While this can work at a basic level of predictive analytics, predictive analytics at it's most effective application requires extremely large amounts of data and thus is best suited for analytics platforms wih parallel processing, which support custom analytical applications that query data using SQL.
This brings us to another challenge with implementing predictive analytics in your organization, and that is managing the enormous data volumes associated with it. Some organizations known to apply leading edge analytical techniques, are gathering perabytes (that's approximately 1000 terabytes, or 1 million gigabytes) of data. While these amounts of data require costly data warehouse upgrades, it enables organizations to form very comprehensive analytics and it enhances visitor/customer experience by providing targeted, customized marketing and services.
But with these large amounts of data and data storage comes the challenges of producing the platform for processing this data with complex formulas at fast rates. Because of this, analytic platforms often run off massively parallel processing (MPP) databases. MPP databases coordinate processing of a single program by more than one processor by dividing up parts of a program into several processors with their separate memory and operating systems. But many organizations that cannot afford MPP databases, instead implement analytical platforms as data marts to off-load complex processing.
While these challenges to indeed appear to be complex, the important thing to know is that if you have the architecture to support it, there are several tools out there that take out the complexities and applying predictive modeling.
About Victor Holman
Victor Holman is a business performance and growth strategy coach, consultant, international speaker, entrepreneur and creator of the Business Performance Portal. He has provided his expertise to over 50 government agencies worldwide and hundreds of corporations of all sizes. His goal is to help small businesses outperform their competition by applying business growth strategies and assessment tools that work for large, successful businesses. His highly acclaimed Insider's Secrets Club includes all the tools necessary to grow your business in the shortest amount of time possible.
He provides business consulting for small and large size organizations, business coaching, team performance workshops, and in-depth on-site business assessments for business owners trying to take their business to the next level.
You can access his FREE business assessment tools, business management kits, business training programs, videos, templates, and more at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com
This Article has been viewed 158 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.