An experienced agile delivery lead.

Billions of people around the world are using their smartphones to take pictures, send messages, tweet, Facebook blogs, create podcasts and there is no end in sight with to an infinite creation of data with no limits. In business, there is just as much data created with Excel, emails, and the various business systems such as ERPs, CRMs, Portals, and sensors.

One of my favourite movies is Oceans 13 from the Ocean film series, the character Billy Banks a ruthless casino owner says “I want answers before I ask questions” using his super computer “The Greco” to determine who was trying to cheat him in his casinos.

You may have heard buzzwords such as cognitive intelligence and machine learning and think it’s science fiction or is years away? The fact is, these technologies have been around for years. In the 90s a world first occurred when IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue using Artificial Intelligence (AI) defeated Gary Kasparov, a world chess master in a six-round game of chess.

Since then there has been an explosion of examples of everyday gaming apps using AI or machine learning, to make your experience more fun and challenging. Every time you use online search engines such as Google, machine learning comes into play to help refine what you are searching for online. You may have more recently seen driver-less cars in action demonstrating how they can use AI or machine learning capabilities to self-drive.

What if your Business Intelligence (BI) can also deliver to you real business insights each day? Not only will you start discovering all the hidden parts of your business but also pick up new trends that can start making you money or old trends that once worked and are now losing you money.

I believe this is what the intent of business intelligence is meant to be, putting the I bank into BI. A new reality where you see predictive analytics – what will happen, followed by prescriptive analytics – how we can make it happen become the norm.