The Tasting Panel magazine

April 2016

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april 2016  /  the tasting panel  /  97 It's all over competitive athletics and presidential politics. It's in city planning and those self-driving cars, and it's essential to the business models for all manner of industry, including beverage alcohol. It's Big Data, and it doesn't run our lives—it is our lives. In fact, Big Data is what once was called "life," but now (because, let's face it, the technocrats won) enormous amounts of life's activity, in public and otherwise, is being collected, converted into 0s and 1s, and analyzed. Big Data is either what every company wants or what every company doesn't know it wants yet, which is why Dave Dennis and InsightAction have stepped into the picture. "The low-hanging fruit for the clients we initially engage is making use of the data they already have in a way that everyone in the organization can use to improve their collective performance," explains Dennis, President and CEO of the global business intelligence software company. "When you think about what that does, it aligns an organization so that everyone is working from one version of the truth. So now you can have business critical information at the tips of your fingers that you can act upon and have intelligent conversations across functions to maximize organizational opportunities." Not that long ago, industries were very keen on collecting as much Big Data as possible, even if individual companies were unsure of what it all meant and how to utilize it. Today, it's simply not good enough to capture as many data points as possible; it's how the data is collected and aggregated that truly mat- ters. Stephen MacLeod, Chief Data Scientist at InsightAction, knows big data all too well: "Without fail, every company we have ever met with has more data than they know what do with. We help them leverage that data and provide insight that everyone can use to improve performance." So InsightAction begins by "analyzing information and loading into one of their applications in such a way that often when it's presented back to a client, they hardly recog- nize it as being their own, which leads them to find insights that they didn't know existed. It's a game-changer," says Dennis. Big Data is the single greatest data opportunity firms could be pursuing: "The dawn of large-scale affordable data processing systems has opened up tremendous potential," says David Garrard, Vice President, Software, for InsightAction. It's a "game-changer" for a number of reasons, including the fact that real-time information is business critical to capitalizing on emerging oppor- tunities, and InsightAction emphasizes real-time collection of data from field intelligence. As fast as the data is available is as fast as it can be accessed. But—just as critical—that information is presented back to end-users within a custom-designed software package that applies game theory and gaming mechanics to produce easy-to-navigate programs. Why is this important? Because InsightAction understands how people navigate information. Joe Lacroix, Director of Creative and Front-End Design, has worked on development of some of the most successful video games in the world: "Working in game design has given me a unique perspective on how to turn complex interactions into a simple user experience to provide an engaging user experience that will keep the user coming back," he explains. "When people pick up an iPad or download an app, they know how to use it immediately. They know how to navigate and to access what they need. That's INSIGHTACTION USES BIG DATA TO EMPOWER FRONT LINE SALES BY ANTHONY HEAD / PHOTOS BY NICK WONG InsightAction Inc. President and CEO Dave Dennis.

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