Insight: Are We There Yet?

It’s that time of year. Yesterday, my sister and her family packed into their vehicle and are now on their summer vacation road trip to visit me. I can almost hear the kids in the back seat doing the time-honored “Are we there yet?” routine. That reminded me of a paper I published 11 years ago as a Gartner analyst entitled “Intelligent Business Intelligence: Are we there yet?” It examined current (at the time) BI vendors and technologies, and evaluated the effectiveness of these BI tools to meet business requirements. My conclusion: not yet.

Fast forward to today, and clearly so many things have changed. Query and reporting technologies are no longer adequate. The digital lifestyle has spawned massive amounts of data continuously being created. Data about every click, swipe, scan, visit, purchase or any other type of transaction is captured and stored somewhere. This translates to huge datasets that need to be analyzed to gain business value about customer behavior.

And these datasets don’t stay static either, but are highly dynamic. Not only has the digital era created large volumes of data, but it has also dramatically shortened attention spans. Content is now viewed in shorter vignettes or webisodes, and information is now shared in 140 character “soundbytes”. Thus customer insight gained from analyzing these datasets might be valuable for only a very short window of opportunity before they become irrelevant.

Analytic technology of today must therefore be able to quickly derive insight from very large and rapidly changing datasets in order to support critical business decisions, while it still matters. Omniture is announcing today availability of Omniture Insight, Omniture’s multi-channel analytics solution, which does exactly that.

Omniture Insight synthesizes data from any source, including business intelligence tools, data warehouses, web, call centers and point-of-sale in retail, to rapidly correlate online and offline data for a better understanding of customer behavior and preferences. Omniture Insight accomplishes this with powerful data discovery and visualization technology that allows customers to drill down to granular levels of data and quickly identify new business opportunities and key trends that might otherwise be overlooked.

My sister is arriving this afternoon. So when the kids ask “Are we there yet?” my sister can say “Yes, I can see your uncle’s house.”
And with “Intelligent Business Intelligence: Are we there yet?” I can say “Yes, I can see it now”.

• Jose Santa Ana
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•  Channel Analytics

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