Accenture Technology Vision 2013

Trend 3. Data Velocity
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Your 100-day plan
In 100 days, create a data velocity strategy to match the
speed of your insights to the window of opportunity
available to act on them.
• Survey business units to determine where they have
critical decision-making bottlenecks.
• Determine which decisions are data-processing
dependent.
• Prioritize opportunities based on the cost-benefit
tradeoffs for accelerating the decision. Speed
costs money.
• Create tactical deployments based on the prioritized
opportunities with current tools and methods.
• Data champions should update the data catalog to
incorporate data-processing criteria.
crucial for IT groups to still rely on
non-real-time data where possible,
blending fast and slow to solve
problems cost-effectively. Of course,
skilled developers already do this;
for some, it harks back to their
training in engineering. Enterprise
systems are no different. You might,
for example, precompute much of
your customer analytics. The batch
analysis from your weekly churn
report may tell you that you’re
in danger of losing a longtime
customer, but discovering that
that customer, already identified
as at-risk, is currently browsing
lower-cost service options on your
Web site could give you the hook to
find a way to keep from losing your
customer altogether.
As the challenges of accelerating
data become more sophisticated—
involving soaring volumes of
unstructured data, for example—the
trick will be to apply “hybrid insight”
as often as possible. This calls not
only for changes in architecture
but for changes in skills as well. It
requires that software-engineering
leaders seek out and reward
developers who demonstrate a
definite “speed mindset.”
Those who show an aptitude for
blending real-time insight with
batch insight—and knowing when
to use each—will be extremely
valuable. For example, take the case
of a healthcare-insurance provider
that has to meet a tight deadline
on a government mandate to
predict subscriber attrition. The IT
group can run the work in batches
to meet the compliance deadline,
but over the long term, the group
can use the insights from that
work to understand and predict
“attrition propensity” in every other
interaction with insured patients and
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