Digital Transformation Requires an Active Intelligence System

In a dynamic and increasingly complex business environment in perpetual motion, decisions are often ineffective because companies lack data and analytics systems that can reflect the “business moment.” We define business moment as a transient opportunity for people, data, and businesses to work together in unique, situationally adaptive ways in order to create increased value.

Optimizing the potential of a “business moment” calls for an emphasis on Active Intelligence, or a frictionless state of continuous intelligence where technology and processes trigger immediate actions from real-time, analytics-ready data. This in turn enables the business to feed off continuous, high-frequency, intuitive insights derived from all data.

In order to gain relevant, real-time insights for actionable decisions, IT and data leaders should keep these three important considerations in mind.  

• Support for real-time and hyper-contextual data

For data to reflect the “reality” of the business moment, it needs to be real-time and hyper-contextual, oriented with a correct business view and a use-case-centric focus.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed several examples of this requirement. Every organization had analytics-ready data, but most of them struggled with answering urgent business questions to make necessary changes in a timely manner. The organizations needed access to and visibility into real-time changes while also defining new business logic. They also needed the ability to conduct data calculations that reflected and analyzed the business reality of the moment. This requires real-time data integration with fast, iterative transformation and continuous ingestion capabilities.

• Create extended collaboration

This type of collaboration covers all type of users and personas across the full spectrum of data, from ingestion to insights. In traditional analytics and BI platforms, collaboration has only been thought of for analytics consumers. Most of today’s passive intelligence products support some form of collaboration, providing capabilities that support the sharing of and communication about the output from the analytical pipelines.

The need to move fast, as well as merge and use new data sources, however, requires new thinking about collaboration, where the circle of collaboration extends beyond analytics consumers. With Active Intelligence, collaborative capabilities cover the entire data and analytics supply chain, bringing together all data and analytics personas, from data integrators and data stewards to BI developers and analytics consumers. This extends collaboration beyond the “last mile” of the analytics pipeline.

• Move analytics from “Surveillance Mode” to “Decision Mode”

Data and analytics don’t change the organization. Decisions do. Active Intelligence delivers decision makers relevant, personalized insights in context, in the moment, for every moment, automating and scaling the decisions with powerful, trusted, and embedded analytics.

• The Bottom Line

Active Intelligence forms the centerpiece of fast-paced digital business and process optimization, leveraging AI, real-time data integration and insights generation, personalization, and expanded collaboration capabilities. It represents one of the biggest opportunities for data and analytics leaders to accelerate their organizations’ digital transformation.

Business, data, and IT leaders must prepare for the growing demands of digital transformation by including Active Intelligence capabilities in their analytics and BI strategies.

Qlik offers solutions for building and optimizing Data-to-Insights pipelines and institutional expertise for achieving enterprise Active Intelligence goals. To learn more, click here.