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Imagine any milestone in your lifetime when fear potentially stood in the way of watershed success. Switching career paths, moving to different parts of the country, or even something as simple as buying a new car. If the fear of change or failure prevented you from making a move, could you imagine what would happen if you stayed stagnant? Chances, are you couldn’t have achieved a certain level of progress.

In the cloud universe, where seemingly every IT function is “as a service” compatible, there are three main cloud service delivery models that businesses leverage every day to run their operations:

One of the advantages of being a Business Analytics consultant, is that you rarely know what a feasible solution looks like until you have taken the time to truly understand your client’s business, strategy and culture. This applies to financial performance management (including financial reporting, planning and customer profitability modeling), just as it does to predictive and prescriptive analytics problems which may not always directly impinge on the Office of Finance.

No review is complete without taking a sneak peek at what’s coming next. In our last blog, we discussed noteworthy Big Data events that stood out in 2014. One of trends that had already been forecasted in projections for 2014 is that Big Data spending will continue to increase. IDC has projected that Big Data will reach $125 billion worldwide in 2015. This growth rate is three times faster than originally anticipated.

In turn, as spending increases, there should be a natural uptick in Big Data deployments. Right now, plenty of people are investing dollars into Big Data solutions, but to this point, deployments have largely been at a standstill.

Whenever New Year celebrations kick start, news stations run their yearly recap montages in a thrilling, cinematic fashion. So while we may lack some of the pyrotechnics of those broadcasts, you can still anticipate a lot of excitement from this 2014 Big Data recap. After all, Big Data is such a hot topic of conversation, even the White House is talking about it – but more on that in a bit.

Back when the year started, we discussed how much organizations were spending on Big Data compared to other IT areas (the tally was $34 million according to Gartner). While we are still waiting on the financial figures to come across to draw a direct comparison, there are some other interesting numbers to chew on.

As we mentioned in a previous blog, Predictive Analytics is More than a Magic Act, one of the impediments to predictive analytics success are company-wide misconceptions. These misconceptions can arise before a predictive analytics roll out even begins.

Predictive analytics certainly has the power to influence major decisions at the top. For instance, if a company is looking into a merger, executives may want to forecast the financial risks involved or evaluate the impact the move could have on consumer demands. Or if decision-makers are contemplating a change in their current business model, predictive analytics can help them identify new opportunities that could come with the change.

The way analytics are described in some marketing and sales circles, it almost seems like you just need to push a button, numbers are spit out, and your company gains this amazing knowledge transfusion to make better decisions. It’s like having a direct link to a magic eight ball that actually works. As James Taylor (yeah, you guessed it, not that James Taylor) explained, there is much more work involved for realizing the value that predictive analytics bring. Companies that experience failures when they start their predictive analytics projects tend to lose sight of the most essential steps.

Taylor—the CEO of Decision Management Solutions—explained how to avoid common pitfalls of predictive analytics in the MIT Sloan Review article, The Four Traps of Predictive Analytics (link to article: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-four-traps-of-predictive-analytics/).

Predictive maintenance (PM) programs, in asset heavy industries, can generate massive ROIs. These ROIs are delivered through the following benefits: