Just in the last 2 decades we have moved from information scarcity to overload. While there was so much focus on data generation, aggregation and distribution of information, we have barely touched on analytics let alone leverage analytics – creating actionable intelligence around the data that is being generated. Our current generation analytics are static and not contiguous: not real time: does not drive real time productization – in other words Contiguous Productization.
Data mining which was looked at as a fringe benefit of technology was relegated to research labs has become front and center of current generation business operations and success. Business Intelligence is very critical for retail and industrial sectors – small, medium and large enterprises – across the board. In fact leveraging Analytics is a key competitive advantage for leading CIOs in this day and age.
Market research, customer surveys and benchmarking used to be part of external vendor solutions. Today businesses can generate similar data, analysis and intelligence with off the shelf tools and open source technologies.
For example, we were happy to just gather the data two decades and over the years have learned to track the progress of our business using the data generated to manually respond to the analytics generated by the data. From late 1990s we have seen a slue of business intelligence software companies that helped traditional industries to leverage the richness in the data that is generated during their normal process of production & operations. Faster computers, more powerful networks, society’s propensity to live, share and propose in the virtual worlds is helping generate more data, crunch the data in real time and respond to changes in customer interaction. Consumers and end users are not consuming in silence – technology has paved way for them to share their knowledge and experience – which in turn helping businesses increase their own productivity, customer satisfaction and affinity.
Points of “data generation” has also increased – initially started with understanding and learning internal processes, operations (that made way for Six Sigma and others) to capturing data through interactions with customers and end users.
Today Social Media is much more than just an outlet for Teens to dish out their personal factoids: it has become a “PR and Sales engine” for businesses in all verticals; data mining has entered a new era – opening opportunities for innovation and productivity.
Where do we go from here?
Businesses can ingest, analysis massive amounts of data in real time and issue predictive intelligence for product teams to respond to changes in end user interaction and market direction.
IBM InfoStream is targeting “Stream Computing” for crucial business verticals. All that will enable only certain businesses to respond to information and data generated by other computers and devices on the network. While this is step in the right direction, we are still long way for achieving Contiguous Productization.
Abundance of data and near real time response is not good enough in the future. While innovation in real time response to analytics will be limited to critical and crucial verticals (such as medicine, security, natural calamities and so forth) in the near future, rest of the verticals will catch up in a hurry.
Product innovation through internal research is archaic. Businesses need to align their resources and processes to tap into collective intelligence, end user feedback and customer touch points. Contiguous Productization is possible with real time capture of data, analysis and response to the intelligence generated by the data.
Internet & Software based industries will have tremendous opportunity for Contiguous Productization in the future. This concept of productization also brings its only challenges and new nuances; For example, software and platform releases and versioning we have been used in the past few decades might become an out dated practice – at least the concept of small change and patch releases will cease to exist. Businesses could benefit from collective intelligence without really becoming open source.
Analytics is only means to an end. Its not end all. Analytics should lead to product innovation – in real time – not to serve some distant future but NOW! Contiguous Productization through actionable analytics turns Customization from a Privilege to a Standard Feature. Niche replaces mainstream. Niche is mainstream!
