theCUBE Live With IBM Lead Analyst Glenn Finch

So far, the main talking point around unstructured data has been the overwhelming size of the load, but now that the industry is shifting its attention from the technology to the use cases, IBM global analytics lead Glenn Finch sees the focus changing to the speed at which information is processed. He dropped by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the tech stalwart’s recent Insight summit to dive into the state of the trends with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante (full video below).

Data management projects have traditionally been multi-year commitments with greatly delayed awards at best, making such undertakings immensely risky and proportionally difficult for CIOs to justify to their peers over on the business side of the enterprise technology divide. But that is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, according to Finch, with the majority of enterprises embracing on analytics initiatives expecting to realize a return on their investment within a year.

That reflects the growing trend of organizations spending more and more of their analytics budgets on operations, which the executive said accounted for over 40 percent of the total this year compared to about half that in 2013. And that shift is paying off.

“What’s starting to happen where people aren’t taking two years to build a warehouse is you’re throwing data into a reservoir and you’re coming up with findings, now, and that schism is closing somewhat. The lines-of-business guys can see that you’re answering their questions quick, because there’s no way you can to value in less than a year if you’re not answering business questions,” Finch told Furrier and Vellante.

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That focus on speed also extends beyond the implementation phase to operations, he continued, particularly the time-consuming task of preparing data for processing. This process consumes up to 80 percent of the analytics lifecycle, a situation Finch said is perhaps felt most strongly in an organization’s financial department, where the CFO now spends 250 percent more time integrating information from different sources than in the past. Eliminating that delay is critical to helping organizations realize the full value of their analytics investments, but it’s only the first step to uncovering data insights, a never-ending process that the executive remarked takes an open-minded approach to pursuing goals.

“Data breeds data, so you look CFOs look for more and more things within the data,” Finch explained. “They now start to have some level of data integration and say ‘I wonder what’s causing this’ so they dig deeper, and to dig deeper they got to get more data.” But will alone isn’t enough to harness the power of that analytics feedback loop, he highlighted – it also requires an entirely new leadership mindset.

“To get that done, you can’t have IT and data people there, you gotta have the business people staring at the data looking at what it’s about to say,” Finch said. “It’s daunting when the data starts to speak, that’s when new level of leadership gotta step up again.”

photo credit: Éole via photopin cc