Collecting more data than ever simply because it's less expensive to do so misses the point. There will need to be a corresponding increase in investments in predictive analytics to make all the investments in data worthwhile, says Deepak Advani, IBM vice president for predictive analytics.
The challenge facing IT organizations now, says Advani, is bringing all these technologies and platforms together in a holistic way that advances business goals such as gaining better insight into customer behavior on the Web, reducing incidents of fraud or identifying any other pattern of activities that affects the overall performance of the business.
As predictive analytics continues to move out of the science and engineering community and into mainstream business applications, Advani says it is only a matter of time before predictive analytics technologies prove their worth in a world where there is more data to analyze than any group of human beings could ever hope to do on their own.
Companies that move first when it comes to mastering the convergence of predictive analytics and big data are going to have a major strategic business advantage over rivals for years to come.