Smarter Analytics

What is Smarter Analytics?

Organizations that embrace analytics are outperforming their competition—and the gap is widening. They are extracting insights not only from enterprise data, but also from big data that is continuously flowing in from a variety of new sources. These insights help them make better, faster decisions and automate processes. Analytics is changing the nature of how businesses and governments work. Organizations that don’t integrate analytics into every aspect of their operations are getting left behind.
Smarter Analytics is IBM’s approach to analytics. With Smarter Analytics, you can build a solid foundation of strategic analytics products and services to take advantage of all of your data sources, including structured and unstructured data. And you can get the support you need to manage change and stay one step ahead of your competition.

Smarter Analytics can help you transform your organization and achieve these business outcomes:

• Grow your customer base and retain your most profitable customers.
• Continuously improve operational efficiency.
• Prevent fraud and manage risk and compliance efforts.
• Transform and automate financial processes.

Need for Analytics –

According to recent surveys from Accenture, TDWI and Palladium, the results of the existing approach to Performance Management are poor.

Users are not well enough informed – they do not have access to the right information, and don’t trust it.

Users are not well enough engaged – There are still many decision makers in an organization not leveraging BI and performance management solutions. 

Users are not well enough aligned -- Very few people in an organization understand the corporate strategy.

Due to above reasons -

1. Decision makers are often using ‘gut feel’ and anecdotal evidence to make critical decisions
   
   
2. Data is difficult to access; often it needs to be compiled from multiple spreadsheets, databases, emails etc.   Data is there but often very difficult to access.
3. As we all know, business cycles move fast, especially in today’s rapidly changing and global economy.

IBM portfolio -

The IBM Business Analytics portfolio has a range of solutions built to uncover insights for specific industries such financial services, public sector, distribution, industrial and communications. As well as deliver insights for cross industry solutions such financial performance, customer relationship, human capital, advanced case management, supply chain and asset optimization. These solutions are built based on our experience working with clients in each of these areas.

By using this Business Analytic solutions -

• Operations teams could Impove the production capacity and align them with the demand coming from the sales forecasting
• Product Development teams could reduce portfolio gaps based on market information and and customer feedback
• Finance teams could drive Growth and Profit through Resource Allocation
• Sales teams could close deals faster and improve customer profitability
• Customer Service teams could reduce churn and improve customer loyalty
• Marketing teams could improve the competitive positioning and drive greater demand

These solutions leverage a range of rich Business Analytics capabilities from 5 core areas. These categories are –

1) Business intelligence  (http://www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/subcategory/SWQ20)

Harness the data explosion, meet your organization’s needs for flexible business intelligence deployment options and satisfy user expectations with powerfully simple analytics you can’t outgrow.

With IBM Cognos business intelligence and performance management software(http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/cognos/), you have the integrated dashboards, scorecards, reporting, analysis, and planning and budgeting capabilities you need to gain and act on fact-based insights..

2) Financial performance and strategy management  http://www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/subcategory/SWQ30

Guide management strategy in the most profitable directions with timely, reliable insights, scenario modeling and transparent and timely reporting.

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(http://www.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/products/tm1/)

IBM Cognos® TM1® capabilities span personal, functional, and enterprise requirements for planning, analysis and reporting to help Finance drive timely decision-making.

3) Predictive and advanced analytics http://www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/subcategory/SWQ50

Discover subtle patterns and associations and develop and deploy predictive models to optimize decision-making.

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With IBM SPSS predictive analytics software (http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/spss/), you can use statistical analysis, data and text mining, predictive modeling and decision optimization to anticipate change and take action to improve outcomes.

4) Governance, risk and compliance

http://www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/subcategory/SWQ40

Gain deep insight into all aspects of risk management, including governance, risk and compliance, with an integrated solution that adapts to your organization’s unique risk profile and methodologies.

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OpenPages GRC software (http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/openpages/) allows your organization to manage enterprise operational risk and compliance initiatives using a single, integrated solution.

5) Analytic applications (http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/cognos/analytic-applications/)

http://www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/subcategory/SWQ10 Provide line-of-business managers with actionable insights through packaged analysis and reporting solutions.

And these solutions and capabilities have been designed to leverage a foundation of trusted information built upon rich data management capabilities and optimized systems from IBM.