Business intelligence without proper data management is a futile exercise

Johan Ceronio, CEO – Praesignis

Data is all around us, not only just in business but in everything we do. It’s incredible the value that you can get out of data, looking at anomalies, looking at outliers. If businesses started realising the value of proper data analytics and data science, we would see a tremendous growth in businesses exploiting new avenues that they didn’t even know existed, and that might have a huge, positive impact on their bottom line.

The industry has changed. Previously it was all about business intelligence, now it’s all about being able to visualise your data. Businesses want to use their data to predict and find and do things that they were not able to do before. They want to do this live, in real time and connected to social media and sentiment. Social media is a driver of sentiment.

Let’s unpack some of the main trends and challenges in the industry right now: the move to big data and social media analytics. The challenge with this is that you can only really get the value when you can integrate the unstructured data with your structured data, in an organisation. A lot of big data is unstructured data. If you can link it to your structured data it will give it value and give it context, then it becomes useful.

Another major challenge, is that data is no longer part of IT, it is part of business. Data and data management should be divorced from IT and managed on its own, as an asset in an organisation. Data is a management science on its own.

“Big ideas are needed to fully harness the power of big data,” says Peter Lynch, emeritus professor at the school of mathematics and statistics, University College Dublin, in his article published on The Irish Times – online, 2 June 2016.

Lynch goes on to say, “Globally, something like five exabytes of data are created every day. That is about a million million million words. The data comes from a multitude of sources. Among these are internet traffic, phone calls, education, medical and health records, court reports, genome sequences, astrophysical observations, stock market movements and social networks. On Twitter about 6,000 tweets are sent every second, which means 500 million per day and about 200 billion per year.”

How do we make sense of this data? At Praesignis we help our customers to uncover and manage the golden nuggets, the valuable pieces of information, so that the people at every level in the organisation can make decisions based on proven facts, rather than just gut feel and emotion. We do this by using our extensive experience in the business and data fields, supported by leading software, methodologies and tools. We help our customers to manage, protect and integrate their data to best support their business.

The data and BI space is a very dynamic environment. An environment where there has been a lot of competitive consolidation with constant changes in the competitor and product environment. As a company, Praesignis is agile and willing to change and keep up, which means we stay in the game and on top of the game. How do we do this? Through innovation. We are innovative in every approach to our business, not only in our products and services, but also in the way we operate our business. “The Praesignis management culture of 'follower-leader' is an example of the value-adding interaction between our clients, internal experts, and management to ensure timely positioning and growth in an ever-changing world.”

Looking to the future...

With the restructure of the company last year, we launched our divisional sub-brands. Through these sub-brands - Datasignis, Intellisignis, Talentsignis, Edusignis, we now offer a comprehensive range of services focused on business intelligence, analytics and data management, as well as our Caresignis brand, which is our corporate social responsibility division, ensuring that we consistently contribute to and support the communities in which we operate.

We now have the capability to expand in multiple directions, where the leaders are specialists in their own fields. In our drive to become a global player, we carefully select our partners, like IBM, a global international technology company, Microsoft, and Tableau for data visualisation, and we have an agreement with Alvaras & Marsal, a global professional services company, to be their technology partner for Africa, to implement and support them in their solutions.

So, in five years from now we will be a global company, operating globally on new innovative products and solutions, with our value proposition as our driving force... "Extracting real value from data, using innovative techniques and solutions, in an affordable and sustainable manner, to ensure management insight and company growth.”