Make Data Intelligence Pervasive

Like the water surrounding a fish, or the air we breathe, when something is pervasive, it supports nearly every moment of our lives without our conscious awareness. Its absence is noticed, not its presence. For example, electricity is pervasive — when we walk into any building, we don’t think twice about being able to switch on a light. We think very similarly about the Internet, which 84.4% of the developed world can now access. Consider how the terms “sign on” and “go online” have become largely meaningless, as we now must be intentional about going offline.
 
To keep up with the endless stream of information this pervasive Internet is creating, organizations are automating data collection and analysis and turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all of which injects even more data into this expanding digital environment. However, gleaning intelligence from these activities is anything but pervasive. In fact, 81% of senior business leaders want data analytics to be more pervasive in their organizations, according to a recent global survey. In the consumer technology world, users can say a few words to their smartphones and instantly get an answer. But in the enterprise, overly complex analytics technologies, restrictive access policies, and over-reliance on a select few data scientists make drawing conclusions from data require multiple teams and months of work.
 
To find answers to their toughest challenges, companies seek pervasive data intelligence, which encompasses all data, all the time, while also assuming that data alone is not enough. Data is just the raw material that companies manage and analyze. As tools and frameworks used to process, visualize, and understand that data, analytics are only a means to an end. The enterprise must ultimately strive to gain intelligence, which rises above analytics to get to answers and outcomes. To get there, an organization’s data must be:

• Scalable: An organization’s ability to view 100 percent of its data is essential to efficient automation, which has become a key differentiator and first line of defense. Gaining that holistic view of the business is vital in a fast-moving, complex marketplace.
• Frictionless: When employees have seamless access to data that influences their daily decision-making, innovation takes place across functions more effectively and quickly.
• Omnipresent: Pervasive data never sleeps; it’s always available, in real-time, when it’s needed.

As we enable pervasive data intelligence around the world, we’ve seen our customers more comprehensively understand their businesses, customers’ behaviors, and market trends and arrive at the most accurate decisions. Because of pervasive data intelligence, a logistics customer can involve all of their thousands of employees in understanding and acting on data. We see major financial institutions previously limited to using only a subset of data finally able to analyze all of their data, in real time, and more effectively protect their customers from fraud. For marketers, pervasive data intelligence provides insight not only on a single campaign’s performance but also on how that campaign has had a cross-functional impact across the entire business.
 
Every day we’re getting closer to realizing our vision for the enterprise—where gaining business intelligence is as easy as switching on a light, or opening a smartphone app. We’re confident that by empowering organizations everywhere to rise above analytics to get the full-picture view of 100 percent of their data, we’ll make pervasive data intelligence a powerful organizational norm.