As it is customary, let me share what I foresee as being big this new year… I would like to focus on just three points that are striking me as important in no particular order.
1. Predictive Analytics
Well, of course, we have been seeing that trend develop for a while. This is certainly not a surprising entry in this list.
The fact is that we see more and more projects combining predictive analytics and business rules. What is really interesting to me is the fact that more and more business analysts are getting trained to develop some of these predictive models.
Given the data scientist shortage, it make total sense. If you do not have a modeling team in-house or if it is swamped with high priority projects, you may as well look for other ways to leverage the available data to inform your decisions.
I am optimistic that we will see more business analysts add predictive analytics to their skill set.
2. Business Intelligence
Sticking with analytics at large, I see also a greater synergy between business intelligence and business rules. We have talked about ‘Operational BI’ for a while now, but there seems to be a lot of activity finally taking shape.
I believe that there will be more projects that actually combine both in 2014, allowing companies to act on the gained from monitoring historical trends.
3. Internet of things
When I was still in my early years, we dreamed of ‘intelligent’ equipment, cars and other things that would make our life easier. While embedding computers in all things around the house has been cost prohibitive for the mass market back then, the Cloud is now making it a reality.
The beauty of having ‘things’ that can communicate is that they are immediately candidate for ‘higher intelligence’. By hooking them up with a decision service on the cloud, we can seamlessly allow them to act more appropriately and subtly to signals they sense around around. They can better adapt since changing their behavior does not involve any hardware changes, or more generically any changes in-situ. The intelligence is located on the cloud, readily available for all connected things.
I am totally in awe with the progress we have made thus far, and the potential for a global ‘increase of intelligence’ of the things around us. The future is now!
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