Data analytics nears adulthood but has it grown up yet?

The problem with business analytics technology is that it has just about emerged from puberty and adolescence but nobody has given it a bank account and introduced it to the opposite sex yet. Analytics has been around in one form or another ever since Henry Ford decided to catalogue his motorcar assembly line measurements a …

[ecofeco]

All well and good

But if the people in charge don't act on the data in an intelligent way, then it's GIGO, isn't it?

Then there's information overload. Anyone remember that one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Second order uses only

Analytics will only ever allow you to tweak things. The reason is that the types of people who seek guidance from data are followers, not leaders.

If you want to stay ahead you need leadership not data. Data can only tell you what the curve looks like. Leadership takes you off one curve and starts a brand new one

[Harry Kiri]

"Time to introduce "descriptive analytics" and "predictive analytics”. "

A graph. And what a graph does next.

“This is already leading to the creation of advanced, almost-neural systems, which can learn complex patterns amid large data sets to predict the probability that an entity will exhibit behaviours that are of interest to the business. It is not confined to structured data."

Apart from that not making sense, learning complex patterns is a piece of piss. Matching a complex pattern in a meaningful way against previously unseen data is not. Proving its working without lots of test data sets is tricky too.

[keithpeter]

concrete examples?

Any actual examples of the use of the analysis of unstructured data?

Commercial secrecy &c so a made up one would do.

I could use that in teaching (my 2nd year BTEC Business students are quite bright and all want to retake GCSE Maths to try to get a B or an A)