At a recent Claims Conference, one of the key note speakers said “Stand Still & Be Left Behind” and I would like to add?“Stand Still, Be Left Behind, and Walk before Sprinting, Be Financially Safe and Profitable”.

Business Intelligence (referred to as BI) increasingly used in companies are usually in the form of Standard Reports, Dashboards, Alerts, Query / Drill Downs or Ad hoc Reports. Companies sometimes find it hard to find these traditional BI skills that can do data and business analysis to optimize BI for company’s growth and profitability. BI provides an AS-IS picture but to provide an efficient and effective BI solution (reports or Alerts), skills needed should include a data analyses + techniques & tools + business process analyses. Given that its rare to find skills that can do all this how can a company make a transition from BI to Advanced Analytics.

What is Advanced Analytics? Advanced Data Analytics includes Statistical Analyses, Forecasting, Predictive Modeling, Social data Analyses, Text Mining, Link Analyses, telematics and optimization. Should a company drop BI and start developing Predictive Modeling. Should a company hire data scientists / Social Data or Text professionals and bring in tools that can provide them INSIGHTS to companys’ TO-BE world?

My thoughts are a company needs a mix of both, the proportions of the mix depends on real value each mix would provide. And companies must start small, take advantage of vendors who specialize in both along with understanding the Insurance Domain and who have the technology, infrastructure and Solutions to transition from BI to Advanced Data Analytics. A?TRUSTED ANALYTICAL PARTNER!