Name That Analytics!

One of the classic definitions of business analytics (BA) describe it as the skills, technologies, applications and practices for the exploration of past business performance to gain insight and drive business strategy. It is clear that analytic systems are great tools to help you understand why things happened over time.

However, what happens when executives want to actually increase key metric visibility in the form of having monitors all throughout an organization where targeted employees (maybe even all employees) can see what’s happening in the company, right now? We are seeing dramatic increases in interest and project development in this next step of analytics where near instantaneous visibility of meaningful analytic data is broadcast to a wide audience, including web-based intranet views and to mobile devices.

So, in an age where labels are helpful, what do you call this kind of analytics effort? We have kicked around a few ideas and we’d like you to weigh in with your thoughts.

Is this “Live Analytics” or “Streaming Analytics?” For many, live or streaming seems to indicate more complex, big data platforms, often with down to the millisecond information delivery.

How about “Monitoring Analytics?” This might be a good categorization because it gets right to the heart of the matter. At a first level, this type of analytics does not need big data or operational/business rule intelligence. It is simply a widely-broadcast view of key metrics that are happening right at the moment. You would be dealing with a fairly straight forward “push data” platform and then use currently available technology to visualize the information real time. The problem is that “monitoring analytics” sounds kind of boring.

Maybe it could be “Operational Analytics.” That term is probably better used for the step beyond the monitoring analytics described above. In operational analytics, the systems could actually add operational intelligence into the mix of analytics results and actually cause important business rules to engage. It will require for sophisticated event handling and larger data volumes. Can I take my monitoring analytics and link it all together with predictive analytics to form the basis for a whole new generation of analytic services?

Or how about “Right Now Analytics?” Does that sound better? What are the analytics that I could use right now to make a difference to the business? Today, not next week or next month—in other words—“Immediately Actionable Analytics.” This implies not just a visualization of the problem or issue, but what can I do right now to affect it.

Sit back and put your creative thinking cap on.  We would like to hear from you!