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November 7, 2013

IBM Points to Blueprint for Big Data Analytics Value

Isaac Lopez

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the nature of big data, and more importantly, how to get anything useful out of it. IBM has released a report in which the company says it’s identified a “blueprint” that companies can use in order to create business value from big data and analytics.

In asking the question how organizations can achieve ROI on their big data and analytics investments, IBM’s Institute for Business Value has released a report in which the company says it has discovered nine “levers” that enable organizations to create value from big data.

IBM’s research, based on a survey of 900 business and IT executives from 70 countries, identified leaders of industry who were using the levers in similar ways, which IBM says presents a pattern in which value can be created.

According to IBM, the nine levers that leaders of industry are using to create value include the following:

  • Culture: Availability and use of data and analytics within an organization
  • Data: Structure and formality of the organization’s data governance process and the security of its data
  • Expertise: Development of and access to data management and analytic skills and capabilities
  • Funding: Financial rigor in the analytics funding process
  • Measurement: Evaluating the impact on business outcomes
  • Platform: Integrated capabilities delivered by hardware and software
  • Source of value: Actions and decisions that generate results
  • Sponsorship: Executive support and involvement
  • Trust: Organizational confidence

IBM says that while all nine levers are consistent among its leader organizations, each lever does not impact value in the same way. To this end, the company says that there are three levels of value impact among the levers:

  • Enable: These levers form the basis for big data and analytics
  • Drive: These levers are needed to realize value from data and analytics; lack of sophistication within these levers will impede value creation.
  • Amplify: These levers boost value creation.

“We’ve determined it takes the right alignment of strategy, technology, and organizational structure,” wrote the paper’s authors. “Analytic implementation strategies need to enable an organization’s most important business objectives, the technology in place needs to support the analytics strategy; and the organization’s culture needs to evolve so people use the technology to take action in line with the strategy. The proper alignment of these three key dimensions is needed to create tangible value and results-based outcomes.”

The insights are interesting and the paper itself contains a few case studies, many of which are IBM customers using IBM solutions. Still, in an environment where there is a lot of confusion about how to get from point A to point Z on the big data ROI map, it may be worth taking note of what Big Blue has to say on the subject.

The report can be downloaded here.

Related items:

IBM Takes BLU In-Memory Database to the Cloud 

IBM Ships Hadoop Appliance for the Big-Skills Challenged 

Intel Forms New Internet of Things Group 

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