We’ve seen a couple of examples with BI and analytics, I think you can put them into two categories. Prediction and automation. Prediction simply isn’t good en

We’ve seen a couple of examples with BI and analytics, I think you can put them into two categories. Prediction and automation. Prediction simply isn’t good enough. It may work well for google and Facebook, but that’s because failure is relatively harmless in advertising. No one dies just because you see a commercial for something you just bought. The failure rate is simply too high for us in the public sector, maybe that’ll change, but probably not. I say that because we’re severely limiting the access to data these years over privacy concerns. You could probably do some interesting things with medical data, but to get there, you’ll need to look at medical data and that’s just not happening in the current political climate. Then there is the automation. IBM wanted to sell us Watson analytics on the premise that it could recognise patterns and build the BI models our dedicated team does. So we let them try, and none of the models they came up with was even remotely useful. I can see this changing, but when? And what will our analytics department look like by then? It’s hard to say.