Sensing the Future

You might have thought that a fridge was only good for keeping food and drinks chilled? Wrong! These days it’s doing more. It’s communicating. With only a couple of sensors and some simple software, it has become a smart fridge, that can let you know when to clean it, order food in and suggest recipes.  

Likewise, the new smart kettle – the iPot -  not only does it boil water, it sends a signal to a server every time it’s switched on. So now, just like you do with emails, you can log in and see i-pot usage data for the day. But why would you do this?

Well, imagine you have an elderly relative who lives alone: this is an innovative and useful way to check all is well and they are up and about, merrily boiling water.  

More and more devices are becoming part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its only just beginning. The idea is that millions of smart “things” are connected via sensors and software, and that they will provide us with an ecosystem of information that will enrich our lives, help us make better decisions, navigate the world more easily and with less friction.

Of course this means that the IoT will generate oodles of new data. When lots of data is created, the two data twins “security” and “opportunity” show their faces. Data privacy questions abound, but also the scope for strong data analytics is given.

From the security angle, it is only recently that the UK government announced it will work with OfCom to regulate the IoT across all industries in a bid to ensure data privacy and available capacity for all these connected devices. http://goo.gl/guqufX   Ensuring security, reliability and data protection across more than 40 million devices already connected, will be no mean feat, especially since predictions estimate the number of connected gadgets will increase by 800% in the next 8 years.

If those numbers are startling, then consider the opportunity angle: All this increased functionality means that gadgets and everyday appliances are communicating and churning out data, but in a world where 90% of all data was created in just the last 2 years, who is listening?

Can you have too much data? We have spoken to our customers and not one is crying out for more data. Our customers know they have valuable information about their business in Finance, CRM and ERP systems. Data isn’t the problem - it’s lack of insight.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, it’s difficult to fit the pieces together when you are just guessing what the picture looks like. You can’t tell what will happen next, if you are about to run out of stock, about to lose a customer or make the wrong decision.  By piecing together the puzzle of their data, we help our customers find out exactly what they need to know, so they can act before it’s too late.

Information is in disparate systems that are different and disjointed.  The problem is that people just can’t access that data quickly enough. In fact, many still lack the technology to turn the vast amounts of data they generate into valuable information. Using analytics we help our customers access the right information at the right time.  

More and more businesses are turning to Business Analytics to harness data for precise decision making to improve performance, increase output and reduce costs.