International Institute for Analytics

Each year, the International Institute for Analytics ends the year with a look at the latest analytics trends and the most pressing analytics challenges currently facing organizations. Our predictions are based upon our day-to-day work supporting and advising analytics leaders and organizations. We take advantage of the breadth of expertise and cross-industry perspectives we encounter every day from our clients, partners, and members of the IIA expert network. This is our 10th annual look toward the upcoming year, and our annual Predictions and Priority research brief and the associated webinar have become among IIA’s most popular content of the year. This year, we’ve stuck with our approach of augmenting each of our predictions with a specific priority for leaders to focus on as they attempt to address that prediction. As a result, each priority provides specific guidance as to how to best prepare for, and adapt to, its corresponding prediction.

The vast majority of people building analytics and data science processes have every intention of being good and ethical. As a result, most potentially unethical and evil processes arise in situations where that wasn’t the intention. The problem is typically that proper focus and governance is not in place to keep analytics and data science processes on the side of good. On top of that, what is good and what is evil isn’t nearly as clear cut as we’d wish it to be.

We’ve had technical people focused on the ingestion and management of data for decades. But, only recently has data engineering become a critical, widespread role. Why is that? This post will outline a somewhat contrarian view as to why data engineering has become a critical function and how we might expect the role to evolve over time.

Lately I’ve had a lot of conversations with clients about the intersection of ethics and analytics. I’ve also been presenting on the topic at a number of conferences. The interest in ethics has exploded recently, driven in large part by the rise of artificial intelligence. One common question I get is what my top tip would be for a company to get started in becoming a leader in analytical ethics. I’ll discuss my answer in this post: intentionality.

There is a lot of well-deserved hype for artificial intelligence algorithms and for deep learning in specific. Self-driving vehicles are already being tested and rolled out into our communities. So, the future is here. The way the cars are enabled is partly through using convolutional neural networks to do object detection. There are certainly many other algorithms that are part of the self-driving process, but a lot of the key algorithms that enabled us to get to where we are today are the convolutional neural networks that are explained in this research brief.

While there are many advantages to the cloud, it is also necessary to use caution to make sure that the risks of the cloud are mitigated while pursuing the advantages.

The analytics landscape has matured, broadened, and totally transformed in recent years. This transformation has been driven by a wide range of factors including big data, the cloud, the increase in processing capability, the decrease in storage and processing costs, and the near-ubiquitous availability of algorithms. As a result, an organization must also totally transform the tools and processes it uses for analytics if it is to recognize its analytics potential.

This is our 9th annual look forward into the upcoming year, and the annual Predictions and Priority research brief and the associated webinar have become among IIA’s most popular content of the year. As in the past few years, we have augmented our predictions by also providing some specific priorities for leaders to focus on as they attempt to address each prediction. Therefore, each priority provides specific guidance as to how to best prepare for, and adapt to, its corresponding prediction.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest topics in the analytics space today. Within a two- to three-year span, AI went from relative obscurity to an extreme level of industry attention and media coverage. As a result, organizations that barely knew how to spell artificial intelligence a few years ago are now charging full steam ahead in pursuit of AI initiatives. In many ways, this is a good thing. After all, AI is quite powerful and has the ability to drive tremendous value if applied appropriately. However, this attention also has some negative consequences. Most notably, the topic of AI is so full of hype today that many organizations are struggling to separate what is real and achievable from what is pure hype and wishful thinking.

How do you choose the right vendor partners to move your analytics program forward? Large organizations today need to partner with vendors to successfully build, deploy, and maintain enterprise-level analytics programs. In today’s world, however, there are so many potential vendor partners that it is hard to know where to begin. An often under-addressed aspect of evaluating which partners to invest in is the need to look at the inherent risk a potential partner brings to the table along with its compelling offerings. This research brief provides a framework for evaluating the risks of potential analytics partners. By developing a consistent and complete approach to assessing risk, an organization will help itself make better investments and, therefore, improve its analytics performance.