FEATURE: ANALYTICS
generate revenue and build fresh ventures by
understanding the market conditions.
“Other sectors such as oil and gas, tourism
and pharma are also following suit and
joining forces with Big Data investments. Be
it, the UAE’s Ministry of Energy launching
oil and gas Big Data project or leveraging
technology to boost insulin production
(a proven case study of Julphar – a UAE
“This means that, when running outbound
campaigns, organisations can target the
specific customers who might be interested
in the offer and is willing to receive
information about it,” he said.
Anas A. Abdul-Haiy, Director and Deputy
CEO at Proven Consult, said one of the truly
great use case of government analytics is
Citizen Account Programme in Saudi Arabia
BESIDES THE OBVIOUS BENEFIT
OF BRINGING ORGANISATION-WIDE
VISIBILITY, AN IMPORTANT FUNCTION
OF ANALYTICS IS TO AID WITH
INFORMED DECISION-MAKING.
Assaad El Saadi, Regional Director – Middle
East, Pure Storage, said tapping into the
power of analytics can seem daunting at
first and there are three main challenges
facing organisations and these include: an
overwhelming amount of data to analyse,
a proliferation of powerful, yet complex
tools and technologies and data silos and
low performance.
“The more data there is, the more complex
harnessing it becomes. Organisations face
the difficulty of conquering the five ‘Vs’ of
data – volume, velocity, variety, veracity and
value. Particularly, with regards to variety,
organisations need to make sure they can
collect and get value from both structured
and unstructured data. Structured data is wellorganised
and easy to analyse with traditional
business tools. By contrast, unstructured data
is harder. Social media posts are an example.
Tweets or Facebook posts can have huge
business intelligence value, but are particularly
difficult to analyse,” he said.
based Pharma Company), data has become
indispensable,” he explained.
He pointed out that in retail, Majid Al
Futtaim, the leading shopping mall,
communities, retail and leisure pioneer
across the Middle East, Africa and Asia
has already deployed advanced analytics
capabilities, which will allow the company to
gather deeper consumer insights and in turn,
champion the personalised experiences it
offers to customers.
According to Avaya’s Dorra, the Middle East
market is seeing enterprises use analytics to
provide enhanced personalisation.
“Let’s take an example in the telemarketing
outreach sphere. In the past, when
organisations had new services to offer
existing customers, they would call anyone
and everyone to get the message out.
Now, through analytics it is much easier
for organisations to run more targeted
campaigns that result in higher rates of
success – as well as better utilisation of
resources,” he said.
Dorra added that this is because analytics
helps with the identification of specific
potential prospects by understanding the
behaviour of customers’ behaviour and
interests through social media and websites.
launched by the Ministry of Human Resource
and Social Development.
Abdul-Haiy explained that it is a national
initiative established by Saudi Arabia to
protect Saudi families from the direct, indirect
and expected impact of various economic
reforms through the provision of cash
transfers deposited directly in the accounts of
the beneficiary citizens on a monthly basis.
The programme analyses the data of the
registered citizens (3.7 million in 2017) to
determine the citizen monthly payment.
CIO and IT teams challenges
Given the fast pace of change happening in
organisations, CIOs and IT teams are always
challenged when deploying analytics in their
IT environment.
El Saadi sad given that unstructured data
makes up 80% of the world’s data, any
company serious about Big Data insights
must find ways to harness it.
“The number of data analytics tools and
technologies available is as overwhelming
as the amount of data available to be
analysed. It can be difficult for organisations
to implement and integrate this complex
myriad of tools alongside existing, older
systems,” he said. “That and legacy storage
platforms are just not suited to support
modern analytics. Common issues include
everything from low performance for search,
index and complex queries from white box
solutions that are not optimised for speed or
efficiency to costly, inefficient data pipelines
that limit data access and create redundant
data silos.”
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