Publications

11/7/2007, By Stephen Swoyer, TDWI

Few technologies provide as much ROI bang for the buck as predictive analytics. Despite its impressive benefits, only 21 percent of respondents to a recent TDWI survey had fully or partially implemented predictive analytic solutions in their organizations, while another 19 percent were in the process of developing them.

Why does adoption continue to lag?

Predictive analytics is a deceptively simple way of describing a set of business intelligence (BI) technologies that help uncover relationships and patterns within large volumes of data. That�s the first part of the predictive analytic value proposition.

The second part (and probably the most important part from the perspective of business decision-makers) is that predictive analytic tools uncover actionable insights. The relationships they discover can, in turn, predict behaviors or events. It�s in this respect that TDWI Research contrasts the forward-looking view afforded by predictive analytic solutions with the historical perspective (that of a "rearview mirror," according to many predictive analytic vendors) afforded by BI tools, which are typically employed less as predictive and more as deductive technologies.

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