ESTA Technologies - Anatomy of an Amitious Analytics Project

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - March 1, 2014 - PRLog -- Data has become an essential currency for organizations. With companies striving to capture information stemming from every single customer interaction, business leaders are faced with one major dilemma—how to make the most of this constantly growing mountain of information.

According to IDC, the digital universe is expected to hit 40,000 exabytes by 2020. To put this gargantuan number into perspective, one exabyte equals one billion gigabytes, which would require more than 15.6 million 64 gigabyte iPhones to store. While data provides an opportunity for organizations to tap into important information, it also poses a challenge, with many companies struggling to make the most of data. As Gartner notes, a staggering 85 percent of Fortune 500 organizations “will be unable to exploit big data for competitive advantage” through 2015.

Further, Big Data shows no sign of slowing down. In December, IDC forecast that the Big Data technology and services market will experience a 27 percent compound annual growth rate through 2017, reaching $32.4 billion. That, IDC notes, is about six times the growth rate of the overall ICT market.

With so much data in hand, business leaders are doing their best to leverage this information across their whole organization. "There’s a lot of data out there," notes Niren Sirohi, a leader in TeleTech’s Analytics Services Group. Unfortunately, this sheer amount of data is, at times, overwhelming organizations which are unsure of where to start to try and make sense of all the information that’s available to them. "They are stuck in the mindset of collecting and storing Big Data, not analyzing it," Sirohi explains.

According to Allen Bonde, partner and principal analyst at Digital Clarity Group, hype around the concept of Big Data has pushed organizations to really think about making the most of the information they collect. "But relating this effort to their day-to-day needs requires a new way of thinking," he says. Although a lot of effort has been made to turn Big Data into actionable insights, not all analytics initiatives are sound ones that will reap results. In fact, several organizations are falling into the trap of biting off more than they can chew and ending up right where they started, even after making substantial investments.