Do you know what is powerful real-time analytics?

In the Digital age today, world has become smaller and faster. 

Global audio & video calls which were available only in corporate offices, are now available to common man on the smartphone.

Consumers have more information of the products and comparison than the manufactures at any time, any place, and any device.

Gone are the days, when organizations used to load data in their data warehouse overnight and take decision based on BI, next day. Today organizations need actionable insights faster than ever before to stay competitive, reduce risks, meet customer expectations, and capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities – Real-time, near real-time.

Real-time is often defined in microseconds, milliseconds, or seconds, while near real-time in seconds, minutes.

With real-time analytics, the main goal is to solve problems quickly as they happen, or even better, before they happen. Real-time recommendations create a hyper-personal shopping experience for each and every customer.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing real-time analytics. Now, with sensor devices and the data streams they generate, companies have more insight into their assets than ever before.

Several industries are using this streaming data & putting real-time analytics. 

·        Churn prediction in Telecom

·        Intelligent traffic management in smart cities

·        Real-time surveillance analytics to reduce crime

·        Impact of weather and other external factors on stock markets to take trading decisions

·        Real-time staff optimization in Hospitals based on patients 

·        Energy generation and distribution based on smart grids

·        Credit scoring and fraud detection in financial & medical sector

Here are some real world examples of real-time analytics:

·        City of Chicago collects data from 911 calls, bus & train locations, 311 complaint calls & tweets to create a real-time geospatial map to cut crimes and respond to emergencies

·        The New York Times pays attention to their reader behavior using real-time analytics so they know what’s being read at any time. This helps them decide which position a story is placed and for how long it’s placed there

·        Telefonica the largest telecommunications company in Spain can now make split-second recommendations to television viewers and can create audience segments for new campaigns in real-time

·        Invoca, the call intelligence company, is embedding IBM Watson cognitive computing technology into its Voice Marketing Cloud to help marketers analyze and act on voice data in real-time.

·        Verizon now enables artificial intelligence and machine learning, predicting the customer intent by mining unstructured data and correlations

·        Ferrari, Honda & Red Bull use data generated by over 100 sensors in their Formula 

One cars and apply real-time analytics, giving drivers and their crews the information they need to make better decisions about pit stops, tire pressures, speed adjustments and fuel efficiency.

Real-Time analytics helps getting the right products in front of the people looking for them, or offering the right promotions to the people most likely to buy. For gaming companies, it helps in understanding which types of individuals are playing which game, and crafting an individualized approach to reach them.

As the pace of data generation and the value of analytics accelerate, real-time analytics is the top most choice to ride on this tsunami of information.

More and more tools such as Cloudera Impala, AWS, Spark, Storm, offer the possibility of real-time processing of Big Data and provide analytics,

Now is the time to move beyond just collecting, storing & managing the data to take rapid actions on the continuous streaming data – Real-Time!! 

Fail fast approach to Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is changing the way customers think & demand new products or services.

Today Bank accounts are opened online, Insurance claims are filed online, patient’s health is monitored online while buying things online is the thing of past. Everything is here and now in real time.

Till a few years back any failure of decision making in business was scary & not acceptable. It had cost companies to go out of the fortune 100 lists. Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, Blackberry are well-known examples of not trying new experiments quickly.

But with the digital era, failure is accepted & it is seen as part and parcel of a successful digital business. Failure must be fast, and the lessons of failure learned should be even faster. It allows businesses to take a shotgun approach to digital transformation.

Fail fast is all about deploying quick pilots and check the outcome. If it does not work then drop the concept/idea and move on to the new one. Be prepared to change the pace or direction as necessary.

No business will undergo the digital transformation without making any mistakes. Even if an organization has the best possible culture & strategy in place, there will be stumbling blocks on the road to success. With the digital technologies like Cloud, Big Data, Analytics, Mobility, Internet of Things, at the disposal, organizations can test innovative ideas quickly before even reaching out to the customer for feedback.

Speed is of the essence here. Testing all the ideas without making huge investments, then delivering the applications in weeks and not months or years to remain competitive. This change has helped organizations to reduce the time-to-market of enhancement on customer experience.

Apple is an example of a company which failed but didn’t give up. It moved on, refined its approach, improved its R&D and eventually launched the product its customers deserved.

Domino's bounced back from customers comments like “your pizza tastes like a cardboard”. With the reboot of the menu in 2009 & digital technology, they experimented online ordering, created a tracker, which allowed customers to follow their pizza from the oven to their doorstep.

Air New Zeland has gone from posting the largest corporate loss in its country’s history to being one of the world’s most consistently profitable airlines by using Big Data Analytics to enhance the customer experience in many ways including biometric baggage check-in, an electronic “air band” for unaccompanied minors.

There are several individual examples of failures and success over time:

·        Steve Jobs was fired from the Apple but came back as CEO & made history

·        Thomas Edison failed over 10000 times before success of light bulb

·        J K Rowling of Harry Potter had lots of failures

·        Michael Jordan succeeded after his constant failure to win

But organizations don’t have this time at their hand. They can learn a lot from these individuals failures but quickly move on and achieve success in Digital Transformation.

In Digital Transformation, fail fast is not an option but it is a requirement!!

Want to know how to choose Machine Learning algorithm?

Machine Learning is the foundation for today’s insights on customer, products, costs and revenues which learns from the data provided to its algorithms.

Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix’s algorithms to give movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon’s algorithms that recommend products based on other customers bought before.

Typical algorithm model selection can be decided broadly on following questions:

·        How much data do you have & is it continuous?

·        Is it classification or regression problem?

·        Predefined variables (Labeled), unlabeled or mix?

·        Data class skewed?

·        What is the goal? – predict or rank?

·        Result interpretation easy or hard?

Here are the most used algorithms for various business problems:

Decision Trees: Decision tree output is very easy to understand even for people from non-analytical background. It does not require any statistical knowledge to read and interpret them. Fastest way to identify most significant variables and relation between two or more variables. Decision Trees are excellent tools for helping you to choose between several courses of action. Most popular decision trees are CART, CHAID, and C4.5 etc.

In general, decision trees can be used in real-world applications such as:

·        Investment decisions

·        Customer churn

·        Banks loan defaulters

·        Build vs Buy decisions

·        Company mergers decisions

·        Sales lead qualifications

Logistic Regression: Logistic regression is a powerful statistical way of modeling a binomial outcome with one or more explanatory variables. It measures the relationship between the categorical dependent variable and one or more independent variables by estimating probabilities using a logistic function, which is the cumulative logistic distribution.

In general, regressions can be used in real-world applications such as:

·        Predicting the Customer Churn

·        Credit Scoring & Fraud Detection

·        Measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns

Support Vector Machines: Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a supervised machine learning technique that is widely used in pattern recognition and classification problems - when your data has exactly two classes.

In general, SVM can be used in real-world applications such as:

·        detecting persons with common diseases such as diabetes

·        hand-written character recognition

·        text categorization – news articles by topics

·        stock market price prediction

Naive Bayes: It is a classification technique based on Bayes’ theorem and very easy to build and particularly useful for very large data sets. Along with simplicity, Naive Bayes is known to outperform even highly sophisticated classification methods. Naive Bayes is also a good choice when CPU and memory resources are a limiting factor

In general, Naive Bayes can be used in real-world applications such as:

·        Sentiment analysis and text classification

·        Recommendation systems like Netflix, Amazon

·        To mark an email as spam or not spam

·        Facebook like face recognition

Apriori: This algorithm generates association rules from a given data set. Association rule implies that if an item A occurs, then item B also occurs with a certain probability.

In general, Apriori can be used in real-world applications such as:

·        Market basket analysis like amazon - products purchased together

·        Auto complete functionality like Google to provide words which come together

·        Identify Drugs and their effects on patients

Random Forest: is an ensemble of decision trees. It can solve both regression and classification problems with large data sets. It also helps identify most significant variables from thousands of input variables.

In general, Random Forest can be used in real-world applications such as:

·        Predict patients for high risks

·        Predict parts failures in manufacturing

·        Predict loan defaulters

The most powerful form of machine learning being used today, is called “Deep Learning”.

In today’s Digital Transformation age, most businesses will tap into machine learning algorithms for their operational and customer-facing functions.

Digital Transformation in Utilities sector

It is easy to take for granted the technology we have at our disposal. We flick a switch and the lights go on, we turn on the tap and clean water comes out. We don’t have to worry about gas for cooking.

But today the Utilities industry is under pressure to simultaneously reduce costs and improve operational performance.

Utilities sector is a bit late in digital innovations than Retail, Banking or Insurance. With energy getting on the digital bandwagon with online customer engagement, smart sensors and better use of analytics, Utilities are now adopting it.

Digital technology gives utility companies the opportunity to collect much richer, customer level data, analyze it for service improvements, and add new services to change the way customers buy their products.

Smart technology will be used to monitor home energy usage, to trigger alerts when previously established maximum limits are being reached, and to offer ‘time of use’ tariffs that reward consumers for shifting demand from peak times.

Electricity is the most versatile and widely used form of energy and global demand is growing continuously. Smart grids manage the electricity demand in sustainable, reliable and economic manner.

Advantages of Digital Transformation:

• Digital makes customer self-service easy.
• Digitally engaged customers trust their utilities.
• Customer care, provided through digital technology, offers utilities both cost-to-serve efficiencies and improved customer intimacy.
• Digital technology brings the capability to provide more accurate billing and payment processing, as well as faster response times for changing addresses and bills, removing and adding services, and many other functions
• Using Mobile as a primary customer engagement channel for tips and alerts
• Predictive maintenance with outage maps and real time alerts to service engineer helps reduce the downtime and costs
• Smart meters allows utilities organizations to inform their customers about the energy consumption, tailor products and services to their customers while   achieving significant operational efficiencies at the same time

Meridian, a New Zealand energy company, launched PowerShop, an online energy retail market place that gives customers choice and control over how much power they buy and use. This helped Meridian attract online consumers and extend its reach of core retail offering.

Google’s Nest, an IoT enabled energy efficiency management gives details about consumption patterns and better control.

Thames Water, UK’s largest provider of water uses digital for remote asset monitoring to anticipate equipment failures and respond in near real time.

Big Data analytics and actionable intelligence gives competitive advantage by gained efficiency.

IBM Watson with its cognitive computing power helped utilities identify trend and pattern analysis, predict which assets or pieces of equipment are most likely to cause points of failure.

Today more than ever, utilities companies are asking: “How can we be competitive in this digital world?” People, whether they are customers, citizens or employees, increasingly expect a simple, fast and seamless experience. 

Digital Transformation helping to reduce patient's readmission

Digital Transformation is helping all the corners of life and healthcare is no exception.

Patients when discharged from the hospital are given verbal and written instructions regarding their post-discharge care but many of them get readmitted in 30 days due to various reasons. 

Over last 5 years this 30 days readmission rate is almost 19% with over 25 billions of dollars spent per year.

In October 2012 the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) began penalizing hospitals with the highest readmission rates for health conditions like acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure (HF), pneumonia (PN), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and total hip arthroplasty/total knee arthroplasty (THA/TKA).

Various steps to reduce the readmission:

·        Send the patient home with 30-day medication supply, wrapped in packaging that clearly explains timing, dosage, frequency, etc

·        Have hospital staff make follow-up appointments with patient's physician and don't discharge patient until this schedule is set up

·        Use Digital technologies like Big Data & IoT to collect vitals and keep up visual as well as verbal communication with patients, especially those that are high risk for readmission.

·        Kaiser Permanente & Novartis are using Telemedicine technologies like video cameras for remote monitoring to determine what's happening to the patient after discharge

·        Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta provides home care on wheels like case management, housekeeping services, transportation to the pharmacy and physician's office         

·        Use of Data Science algorithms to predict patients with high risk of readmission

·        Walgreens launched WellTransitions program where patients receive a medication review upon admission and discharge from hospital, bedside medication delivery, medication education and counseling, and regularly scheduled follow-up support by phone and online.

·        HealthLoop is a cloud based platform that automates follow-up care keeping doctors, patients and care-givers connected between visits with clinical information that is insightful, actionable, and engaging.

·        Propeller Health, a startup company in Madison has developed an app and sensors track medication usage and then send time and location data to a smartphone

·        Mango Health for iPhone and wearables like Apple Watch makes managing your medications fun, easy, and rewarding. App feature include: dose reminders, drug interaction info, a health history, and best of all - points and rewards, just for taking your medicines.

These emerging digital tools enable health care organizations to assess and better manage who is at risk for readmission and determine the optimal course of action for the patients. 

Such tools also enable patients to live at home, in greater comfort and at lower cost, lifting the burden on themselves and their families.

Digital is helping mankind in all ways !!