IT to spend $187 billion making sense of numbers

Healthcare, banking, utilities, and resource industries are set for the biggest growth surge, but research by analyst IDC says that all business sectors will invest heavily in big data and analytics as they attempt to better understand customers and inform their digital transformation and IT priorities.

IDC’s Dan Vesset says that business analytics combined with digital transformation will allow businesses “to adapt to disruptive changes and to create competitive differentiation in their markets.” 

“These organisations don’t just automate existing processes – they treat data and information as they would any valued asset by using a focused approach to extracting and developing the value and utility of information.”

Data, in IT terms, has rarely been used effectively.  Operational statistics that are crucial for monitoring IT rarely offer any insight or “real-world” meaning for people outside of the technology department.  Business analytics, therefore, is a crucial element for modernising and transforming IT – as long as the tools are used to produce numbers which mean something beyond the IT department.