By Suresh Katta, Founder and CEO, Saama Technologies
The importance of the resulting actionable insights gained from the mountains of data currently being collected and made more valuable through advanced analytics can not be understated. Recently, I wrote a blog (What is an ‘Actionable Insight’?) advocating that actionable insights amount to more than another Big Data cliché word of the day. But as invaluable as actionable insights can be, there is a Big Data outcome that can top it: Enabled Intuition.
In the early days of business intelligence (BI) gut feelings played a key role in decision-making based on the data collected. As more advanced BI practices evolved, machine learning has inspired actionable insights, which has been touted widely by Big Data practitioners making the term ubiquitous. While heavily used these days by all of us in the data and analytics field, actionable insights is one of the best ways to describe a key benefit of putting Big Data to work to improve business processes and practices.
The machine learning that leads to actionable insights is very valuable in its own right, but for the most to be gained from our Big Data abilities we need to re-introduce the ‘gut feeling’ or put another way, the human element into our decision-making. Enabled Intuition, therefore, is actionable insights + gut feeling / human element. Machine learning will take us to a certain point, but we must not lose human ingenuity along the way.
It is not possible to build into a computer the quality of cleverness. Only our brains can enhance artificial intelligence in this way. Our ability to process complex sets of events, or discern fact from fiction, is best done by humans, not machine. Enabled intuition happens when an actionable insight is combined with cleverness. When we turn a raw data cell into an analytical element it requires our ingenuity, not a machine’s. We must also act responsibly with the raw data – it must be protected and not manipulated, it must be respected and accepted. All of this requires human integrity.
Without intuitive intelligence, ingenuity and integrity, artificial intelligence can only go so far. Enabled intuition takes into account all of these things, and with it actionable insights can reach higher heights than ever before.
Enabled Intuition with Ingenuity and Integrity. Achieve this and your data and analytics efforts are sure to take you to levels you never thought possible.
