Getting Real Time Insights the Cognitive Way

This story is sponsored by IBM

Imagine if the running condition of your car can be monitored in detail, the information relayed and run through data analytics programs and you receive updates related to car location, service information, trip analysis, traffic updates and much more on the phone. If you thought ‘futuristic’, think again. Vehicles today have dozens of sensors that collect data on driver behaviour, driving conditions, vehicle performance, safety and so on. All it needs is the Internet of Things to connect to the manufacturer through a cloud platform and a cognitive program to do real time analytics of the data.

In an inter-connected world, where devices increasingly talk to one another, the conversation generates huge amounts of data every minute. The provenance of data can be market sources, sensors, mobile and clickstream - but a lot of it unstructured and wasted, whereas it can be analysed for real time insights using cognitive technology. Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day, 1.7 Mb every single minute for a single person, and 80 percent of this is unstructured data.

Let’s take banking: Monitoring credit data is one of the many challenges of the banking system. Fraudulent activities related to credit card usage, payment systems etc. is on the rise and threatening to get out of hand. When cognitive real-time analytics is applied to data, it is possible to detect fraud at the point of sales, at a bank’s ATM or during a transaction - anywhere and anytime. This will enable better prevention, save costs associated with settlements, reversed transactions, investigations etc. and help enhance an organisation’s reputation.

Just as in preventing credit card fraud, cognitive real time analytics at points of sale in a shopping store can help businesses upsell or cross-sell to customers. Real time insights on healthcare check-up results can enable a faster resolution of wellness issues. Real time insights can also enable businesses to create a new brand, new products and services, enhance user engagement and deliver incremental value.

With real-time insights, business is better equipped to take head-on the challenges in today’s competitive environment. The explosion in data is a treasure trove of information that will provide deep insights into a varied number of topics. However, data per se is not guidance if not analysed in real time. The idea is to take analytics to the data and draw actionable insights that can enable your organisation to stay ahead of competition. Businesses can leverage IBM’s IoT Real-Time Insights™ and Bluemix Garage™ to derive actionable insight from data streams on a continuous basis and integrate them into one analytic environment.

To illustrate how real-time data can add value to an organisation’s performance, IBM hosted the Outthink Tour 2016, bringing together technologists and visionaries who discussed cutting-edge trends and relevant business insights.

3-point summation:

As data explodes across all domain, organisations must acquire tools to transform raw data into real time actionable insights

80 percent of data is unstructured and without real time analytics, the value of this data is lost forever

Organisations can leverage IBM Watson, Bluemix Garage™ and IBM Streams™ to analyse large amounts of data in real time, and make effective decisions