60% of strategic decisions are still made without the support of Business Intelligence tools. Big companies are still allocating a 50% of their IT budgets towards infrastructure: cloud solutions are not broadly adopted due to the fear of losing data privacy. Only a 10% starts using predictive analytics. IoT, AI and Machine Learning are believed to be the solutions of the future
Digital transformation in Spain is a fact. Several companies started using cloud solutions, data analytics using IoT sensors or predictive analytics, and developing AI and Machine Learning initiatives.
Last March 29th, Clariba had the chance of participating at the SAP Dreamzone event in Madrid, perfect scenario to talk about these matters. We asked some relevant questions to the assistants:
¿How many of you still make decisions without the support of BI tools?
60% raised their hands. Taking into consideration that most of their companies have BI tools available, it‘s a surprise that only 40% of the management level are actively using them. Clearly, most companies still need to move towards self-service BI tools, as in most cases IT departments are still the BI environment owners, and the culture of Analytics needs to spread and impregnate deeper into the organisation.
SAP Lumira 2.0 offers users self-service powerful analytics features without the need of high IT skills. We believe it will become the main BI solution needed to spread the analytics culture across all levels and people into any organization, allowing a better decision making and ultimately creating efficiency and value.
What % of your annual IT Budget is allocated towards infrastructure and its maintenance?
The audience mainly answered 50% of their budgets are allocated towards infrastructure. Apparently quite a high portion, the reason being most companies are reluctant to move their data out of their premises. This isn’t however an issue for BI tools. Modern cloud-based BI tools like SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and the strate-of-the art SAP Digital Boardroom for high management dashboarding, allow having all dashboards, planning and exploring tools in the cloud, while the data remains at the company’s premises. This way, companies maintain control and protection of their data, while it is consumed online, in a hybrid setup.
How many of you are using predictive analytics?
10% of the audience affirmed using them. Looked like a small % bearing in mind companies are starting to recruit data scientists and experimenting with data prediction and mining.
¿How can SAP help these companies spread predictive analytics into other areas than IT?
The answer is SAP Predictive Analytics together with SAP BusinessObjects Cloud. Both solutions allow users without statistics skills obtain analytics predictions based on historical data. Predefined features such as clustering, data correlation and prediction can be learned in a few hours. The outcomes are impressive and the needed investment is very low, since all these features come bundled in SAP BI Suite Premium and SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.
We foresee this % will dramatically get increased in a short time.
¿How many of you believe IoT, AI, and ML are going to enhance the interaction with customers?
Although companies still see these as distant solutions in time, a vast majority answered affirmatively.
We already see relevant samples of IoT implementations allowing companies to leverage data coming from objects, such as vehicles, industrial machinery, football players, etc. These companies develop solid competitive advantages which were unimaginable before. Predicting the failure of a machine before it happens, thanks to the information retrieved by sensors, has an enormous direct impact on different business areas, such as maintenance, finance, production, etc. Clients are nowadays looking for more satisfying and differentiate experiences. New solutions like SAP Leonardo for IoT and SAP Clea for Machine Learning will become strategical tools.
We at Clariba are aware of this change, and are willing to guide and give advice to our clients in their way towards digital transformation, differentiation and success.