While the US market recognizes three leading companies for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms as is confirmed by Gartner’s magic quadrant – the italian scenario is totally different. The american Big 3 are ahead of other competitors due to their crystal clear strategic vision and their strong ability to develop new solutions for Business Intelligence (BI) and Big Data analysis and management.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2017
The survey analysis, drafted by Assintel in their latest 2018 report (The Italian National Association of ICT companies), makes evident that large and medium-size companies still drive the Italian ICT market.
They invest in Analytics platforms and foresee a continuous growth of their turnover, “while the 20% of the micro companies is falling”*.
The ensuing scenario demonstrates how many italian companies are still not culturally ready to face the Digital Transformation and its new models.
As a matter of fact, the 45% of the italian companies is still “clinging to the efficiency and to the optimization of IT resources, which drains energies during the everyday operations” to new organizational models and to digital products.
*source: Assintel Press Release of 2018 Report
BIG DATA AS TRANSFORMATION DRIVER FOR ANALYTICS AND THE BI
Interlogica is part of those companies that have understood this moment of change: “We’re witnessing how the new emerging paradigms are reshaping strategies, values and competitive assets… a continuous research of new balance between continuity and disruption is necessary, along with players and partners, as a part of this innovation trend, and with the changeover of technologies, services and skills”**.
For this reason, the adoption and management of Big Data and Analytics will grant companies- especially to managers and their teams- to dedicate their time to more valuable activities, for example: governance, business strategies and quality and data security.
In the last two decades we have been witnessing an incredible revolution inside the BI, thanks to some drivers that have quickened the development of innovative solutions:
– the concept of Discovery, namely the release of many data analysis tools with a self-service-oriented BI, has freed end users to do in-depth analysis on their own;
– Big Data, is a huge amount of data collected from multiple and heterogeneous sources to be managed and processed, aggregate information from sources never considered before;
– new solutions for business reports that had to keep up with market needs.
The combined action of these drivers leads to satisfy the need to query data, acquire information faster and make them easily available to all the business users, with the necessity of a smarter technological interface.
Therefore, many companies sought more liberty from the technical skills of analysts and computer scientists – also known as Data Scientists – of the IT department. This issue results in the identification of technologies that enable the digital transformation and a fast match to the markets’ evolution.
Data Analysis, that is the data elaboration and analysis methodologies, appears to be a prerogative of the IT department.
Thanks to the democratization of Analytics and the automation of analytical operations, which have caused bottlenecks for long and have delayed companies’ strategic activities; Data Analysis is available for everyone.
**statement of Fabio Bizzotto, Head of local research and consulting at IDC, Italy
The automate time consuming tasks allows to save time along the decision-making process.
The new methodology, that mainstreams the access to Data Analysis, was defined years ago by analysts as Data Discovery.
Data Discovery makes valuable information beyond Big Data available to all business units, coherently with their business goals and their area.
The evolution of Data Analysis paired with the specific approach.
Data and Business Analytics are the key factors in leading companies’ strategies, a fact that is confirmed by the constant research of innovative solutions that can support decision-making processes.
This scenario is validated by Gartner’s analysts who recently highlighted the importance for all business users – also known as Citizen Data Scientists – to manage and process data along the whole value chain.
SMART DATA DISCOVERY CREATES NEW DISRUPTION
Switching from a technology-oriented approach to a business-oriented one is crucial, since business users needs have returned at the core of the business process. This shift removes the old scheme: analytic solutions are imposed by the IT department.
This key aspect is well-known by Gartner’s analysts who have already wrote about this in a 2015 article “Smart Data Discovery: Enabling a New Class of Citizen Data Scientists”, which also introduced the concept of Smart Data Discovery.
New information coming from every type of data – Data Layer – grants a reduction of time spent for decision-making processes and favours users autonomy from technical support. Previous to this discovery, IT technical support was the only department that could extract and manipulate data to provide valuable information.
In this way it is possible to lead the company towards the recognition of new challenges as well as seizing further opportunities.
Our company figured out clearly where the real competition is in the italian marketplace. The smartest competitors are concerned on raising companies’ awareness on the adoption of Smart Data Discovery tools that allow company users, through intuitive interfaces, to:
- collect, prepare, integrate and analyse data at a more advanced level;
- share proprietary researches;
- assign tactics and strategic activities related to the obtained results;
- suggest possible relations and aggregations;
- identify reference models;
- submit visualizations techniques and formats;
- support the esteemed results of planned activities.
- enable the simultaneous queries from different data layers
All of this doesn’t require the support of computer scientists or analysts, nor the knowledge of statistics or algorithms.
IT knowledge, however, is fundamental for the development of tools requiring machine-learning, which is one of the many applications of Artifical Intelligence. Contextually, the use of machine-learning in a business context streamlines decision-making processes and is a cost-effective element.
The introduction of Artificial Intelligence marks the beginning of a new paradigm named Augmented Analytics. This is a crucial change needed in order to make impartial decisions, coherent with the context, which entails a new category of Citizen Data Scientists.
Indeed, this phase is a milestone that transforms the interaction between data and new Data Scientists, by using and exploiting the information.
Augmented Analytics represents the key element for what was defined as Conversational Analytics, namely an emerging model that allows business users to query and explore data, receive information and act accordingly through voice or text via mobile.
The future of Analytics.
These are the assumptions on which is based, that is the Smart Data Discovery – the second Data Discovery Generation – and the future of data and Analytics.
Our company has a crystal clear vision of the Digital Transformation itself and its new patterns because they represent the environment in which we develop new business models and innovative solutions to satisfy the emerging needs of the market.
