Actionable Analytics: The way forward

Put simply, Actionable Analytics is getting access to relevant data in the correct context; the ability to take action immediately, the power to acquire meaningful outcomes. The fast evolving arena of Business Intelligence and Analytics aims to make analytics ‘invisible’ or more accessible and comprehensible to employees across the organization to enable better, faster and more productive decisions.

Though the reigning trend makes Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics a top CIO investment priority, user surveys by Gartner, Inc. indicate that only 30% of potential users in an organization adopt CIO-sponsored analytics tools. This trend also appears to be undergoing a change since organizations are now moving towards investing to make analytics more invisible, and thus more consumable, to typical nontraditional analytics users.

What the experts say

A Gartner study titled ‘Actionable Analytics Will Be Driven by Mobile, Social and Big Data Forces in 2013 and Beyond,’ foresees sweeping changes in the way businesses will function in the near future. The study indicates that the 3 rapidly evolving technology areas of social, mobile and big data are combining forces to create massive amounts of data that needs smart analytics to make sense of it.

More and more organizations are caught in the vortex of rapidly accelerating business needs, processes and consumer expectations, which in turn are transforming real-time operational intelligence systems from ‘nice to have’ to absolutely ‘must have for survival’. The fact of the matter is that the more universally these analytics can be utilized by business users, decision makers as well as consumers, the greater will be the actual impact on business productivity, activities and progress.

Impact of Actionable Analytics in the US Healthcare sector

The Healthcare industry in the US is caught in the throes of a volatile and constantly evolving context. Given the current scenario of policy and regulatory changes that are affecting financial reimbursement and patient-care performance evaluation, healthcare organizations are being compelled to move adeptly to improve data analysis. The influx of relevant data from Electronic Health Records, emerging health information exchanges, and other data services are giving rise to the need for real-time analytic systems that can correlate structured and unstructured data and at the same time can learn, reason and offer straightforward actionable insights. Users in the industry are increasingly appreciating the significance of highly visual and easily understood data presentation and analysis to take vital decisions.

In fact, the simpler, the more transparent and the more ‘invisible’ the analytics are to users, the more broadly they will be used effectively and the greater will be the impact on business activities and productivity. These effective operational intelligence systems are the key to providing better situation awareness to business leaders which enable them to adopt more prescriptive analytics, make smarter business decisions and reduce personnel costs.

The 3 Thumb Rules of Actionable Analytics

Make Analytics transparent to users
‘To make analytics more actionable and pervasively deployed, BI and analytics professionals must make analytics more invisible and transparent to their users – through easy natural language interfaces for exploring data and through embedded analytic applications at the point of decision or action,’ says the Gartner study. This clearly implies that the simpler the analysis the more effective an productive it is. The users are typically non-technical people who need easy-to-use interfaces and data analysis to enable easy exploration of data. The focus of the boom in big data has shifted from storing content and unstructured data to systems that can find intelligent trends and sound reasoning in the data to enable actual learning and valid findings.

Implement real-time smart analysis
Newsfeeds, tweets, email, blogs and various other sources create an unrelenting stream of unrelated and related data that need real time analysis for business users. This deluge of data also steps up the need for instant responses and smart decisions. The positive is that these are digital sources of data and thus can be easily transformed into logical and structured data for decision makers. The key is for enterprises to use technology to capture and filter data, identify patterns and execute mathematical calculations in the backend so that business users can use the relevant data to predict events/situations or to even respond to a potential or emerging situation in the most appropriate manner. ‘…Where the cause and sequence of events are understood, leading indicators can be used to predict situations of threat or opportunity before they occur – so that the response can be proactive. Where this is not possible, the system can be used to improve the outcome by reducing the lag time between events and responses,’ says the Gartner study.

Automate decisions to control cost and outdo competition
With an ever-increasing pressure to outperform competition and to control costs at the same time, enterprises are being forced to rethink their strategy. There is an urgent need for systems that enable smarter, auditable and repeatable decisions that also help to curtail personnel costs. To meet these challenges effectively, enterprises are being driven towards decision management software technologies that run on-demand, as and when required by the user. These sophisticated technologies enable users to utilize computational support to improve the quality of their decisions and in some cases, with pre-defined criteria, the decision making can be even left to the machine: intelligent decision automation. Such intuitive partnerships between humans and computers are paving the way for more natural inputs such as written or spoken questions, extending analytics to nontraditional users. The friendlier, more transparent and therefore more invisible the analytics are to users, the more broadly they will be adopted — particularly by users who have never used BI tools and this trend will clearly add to Analytics having a greater impact on business activities.
Conclusion

To conclude, Actionable Analytics is truly the future of all smart enterprises. This technology holds the key to re-defining the way enterprises will interact with their customers, partners and vendors. The revelations made through the use of actionable analytics will enable the enterprise and business users to work I a more smart, efficient and productive manner. In the coming years this technology will also enable enterprises who jump on the bandwagon right now to leverage an early start on a tech trend that is about to change the way business is done.

About Saviance

Saviance is a US based Healthcare IT Services provider focusing on the newest technology SMAC stack – Social, Mobility, Analytics & Cloud. We provide innovative solutions & enable meaningful use of IT by designing patient engagement portals, collaboration applications & actionable analytics for wellness & population health. Incorporated in 1999 in the US, with over 14 years of excellent industry track record, Saviance offers services & solutions that enable enterprises to achieve critical objectives.

Saviance is a Gold Category Corporate Member with Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), member of mHealth Alliance and Corporate member of NJ-HITEC. We are awarded by INC. 5000 as one of the fastest growing privately held companies in North America. Saviance is also ranked among the Fast 50 Asian American Businesses in the United States by USPAACC (US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce) and selected as a 2013 "Top Business" recipient by DiversityBusiness.com. A certified Minority Business Enterprise recognized by NMSDC, Saviance is also partner with leading global brands such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Samsung and Red Hat.

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