Leveraging the Cloud to find more meaning in data

January 17, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

The creative use of data often takes me by surprise. I mean, raw data does not tell you much, but when you consider all the types of data and their almost limitless combinations and aggregations, it tends to boggle the mind. Finding meaning in data that is not readily apparent is where advanced analytics and machine learning shines.

The cloud is opening up this world of near-limitless data interpretation possibilities for a lot of companies. Today they can access analytics that were once unaffordable for many enterprises. Moreover, they can now leverage machine learning to add proactive cognitive models to their data analytics. The result is the ability to see things in data, patterns if you will, that nobody could see before.

While this is not a new trend, its value has inflected. The reason? Companies have not done much with data in the near past, and the ability to effectively leverage their own corporate data to gain insights about the business has been out of reach. The commoditization of the technology, and data storage, has changed the game to allow businesses to find that value.

What’s possible now with cloud is the ability to find meaning in data to allow businesses to make almost perfect decisions. An example would be the ability to find patterns in the sales data. When we line up weather and economy data, we see that certain products sell at certain times of the year, based upon the state of the weather, the economic outlook of the average consumer, and other factors.

While sometimes there is a direct positive correlation, while other times the correlation is negative. The idea is to determine what patterns are present, and leverage the data analytics to automate core business processes such as production, inventory, sales staffing, etc. Again, the idea is to leverage data that was always available but now in new and innovative ways, mashing that data to find meaning and patterns that were once unknown.

Other more sophisticated use cases include the ability to determine data that doesn’t exist. For example, the ability to analyze demographic information from web sites and ordering behavior to suggest new things for the customer to consider for purchase. In some cases, this has increased sales by 20 percent with little or no investment from the business.

This, of course, depends upon the data that you use and how you leverage it. The cloud is merely a tool, but if used properly the value delivery back to the business is 100-fold. I’m thinking that makes it worth trying.