The rise of big data means information is coming into organizations in greater volume, variety and velocity than ever before.
Traditional transaction and customer data is being supplemented by inputs from social media, GPS and other areas, and the costs of storing that data are coming down, said Matthew Kuckuk, practice leader, business intelligence, big data and analytics with CGI at this year’s CPBI Forum.
But now that we’ve got all of this data, what do we do with it? “We find organizations, in some cases, struggling with the challenge to cope with the basics of extracting value from all of this information,” noted Kuckuk.
Read: The benefits of big data
He talked about four different ways to derive value from big data:
- descriptive analytics – what happened?
- diagnostic analytics – why did it happen?
- predictive analytics – what will happen?
- prescriptive analytics – how can we make it happen?
From a health benefits perspective, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics present opportunities. “We need to understand, predict and influence human behaviour, and we keep coming up with better ways to do it,” Kuckuk explained.
Health data is a prime example. By analyzing electronic medical records and performing data visualizations, it’s possible to better target interventions at certain demographic populations or employee groups. For instance, data analytics have determined alcohol abuse is more common among middle-age men, while mental health issues are more prevalent among younger individuals.
“The idea here is, mental health interventions…are really best targeted at young people,” said Kuckuk, adding,”We want to find better ways of intervening.”
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