IntelTrax: Top Stories July 27 to August 2
August 6, 2012
Data analytics solutions and other Business Intelligence tools were the primary focus of many of this week’s IntelTrax stories.
Big Data is a continued source of controversy within the analytics community, particularly regarding its existence and whether or not it is something old or new. “Big Data is Analytics for Dummies” argues that big data is simply the rebranding of an old concept.
The referenced article explains the reasoning behind the rebranding argument:
“Cloud computing, for instance, offers much the same thing “ASPs” offered ten years before, with the difference that this time round it is going to work. Similarly, analytics has been available for many years, as a high-cost service using high value supercomputers, and operated by white-coated high priests who have come into the field from linguistics, philosophy and computer science. If you have a big data set, and the money to have it explored, analytics has been there to reveal the secret trends within you information, which might give your business an edge.”
Another notable post from last week is “Data Miners and the Need for Certificates Debunked.” According to the article, due to the fact that every field has been infiltrated by data mining, the need for experts and certifications in the field has come about as a result.
When discussing whether or not certifications have value, the article states:
“The “data mining” definition has been created by marketing industries just to summarize in a buzz word techniques of applied statistics and applied mathematics to the data stored in your hard disk. I don’t want say that tools are useless, but it should be clear that tools are only a mean to solve a problem, not the solution. In the real world the problems are never standard and really seldom you can take an algorithm as is to solve them! …maybe I’m unlucky but I never solved a real problem through a standard method.”
A story that explains the importance of data analytics technology within the insurance industry is “Insurance Doubles Down on Analytics.” According to the article, insurance companies looking to detect fraud are strongly impacted by data and statistics which is one of the reasons why they are embracing the big data revolution.
The story cited:
“The report, which covers the spectrum of tools from business intelligence tools to advanced analytics tools, finds that the average insurer invests 9 percent of the IT budget on data and analytics. This amounts to almost $10 billion per year, and while the insurance industry has long used analytics for traditional risk-centric analysis, there is a shift in the ‘how, where, and when’ the industry leverages data and analytics, according to the report.”
As you can see, text analytics and big data analysis are becoming increasingly important for companies looking to manage their content in a way that makes the most out of a multitude of different types and structures of data. Digital Reasoning is an analytics company with experience providing affordable solutions for both the government and private sector.
Jasmine Ashton, August 6, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext