I’m going to break it to you gently. Despite all the advanced technology lining your pocket, car, home, workplace–and even the proverbial cloud floating virtually above your head–the world is a remarkably inefficient, wasteful place. The organizations that make the world go ’round, the companies, agencies, and hospitals that treat and serve us in every which way, constantly get it wrong. Marketing casts a wide net; junk mail is marketing money wasted and trees felled to print unread brochures. Institutions are blindsided by risky debtors and policyholders. Fraud goes undetected. And, critically, healthcare could use all the prognostication it can get. These are heavy costs that tax both you and I in various ways every day.
If only there were some way to run things better, to improve the effectiveness of the frontline operations that define a functional society.
Upgrading the World
Predictive analytics serves that very purpose by driving mass-scale processes empirically, guiding them with predictions generated from data. Millions of predictions a day improve decisions as to whom to call, mail, approve, test, diagnose, warn, investigate, incarcerate, set up on a date, and medicate.
In this way, predictive analytics reinvents how our world’s primary functions are executed, across sectors. It boasts an intrinsic universality: A great, wide range of organizational activities can be improved with prediction–specifically, by way of predicting the behaviors and outcomes of people, the future of individual customers, debtors, patients, criminal suspects, employees, and voters. It’s that generality that makes this technology so potent and ubiquitous.
Market Growth
So it comes as no surprise that predictive analytics is booming:
• Number one on LinkedIn’s “25 Hottest Skills That Got People Hired in 2014” is “statistical analysis and data mining,” and number six is business intelligence. While most of the other skills listed there are forms of engineering/development (programming, etc.), the meat of the matter–the stuff of business–is what data itself tells us, rather than the infrastructures built to collect and store data.
• Research firms project the predictive analytics market to reach $5.2 to $6.5 billion by 2018/2019 (MarketsandMarkets and Transparency Market Research).
Reinventing Industries
Prediction makes our planet rotate a bit more smoothly. Let’s look at examples of this effect within six industries: Marketing, financial services, workforce management, healthcare, manufacturing, and government….
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By Eric Siegel, from: http://www.information-