Mining new value from data

Research by Accenture's technology labs has pinpointed several trends that will have a significant bearing on businesses in 2012. The main one to watch is context-based services.

These combine real-time signals from the physical world with location data - such as that offered by applications like foursquare which utilise global positioning system technology - online activities, social media and other types of inputs.

For example, a travel company could scan accounts on Twitter in search of mentions about upcoming trips. It then alerts hotels in the communities where the traveller is headed, with the traveller benefitting because the hotel - via Twitter - might offer discounted rates. The hotel gets payback in the form of a potential new customer.

Lee Naik, executive director for IT strategy and transformation at Accenture SA, said South Africa has the technological know-how to create location-based services.

"These services are starting to mature and are being offered locally, right now," he said.

Another trend is convergence of data architecture. The report states that old approaches to managing data are surviving because structured forms of data - the kind of information that is in a suitable form to be placed in a database and is logically linked - makes IT leaders feel they are in control.

But the emergence of new, unstructured types of data - which include blogs, Twitter and some e-mails - is forcing businesses to develop new data architectures, such as technology that scans these sources for certain keywords which can then be logically connected to existing structured data sources to assist in making business decisions.

The report does not ignore the importance of social media to businesses. The popularity of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn has led businesses to try to incorporate them into their business processes, although mostly as an add-on marketing tool, according to Accenture.

"If they fail to engage with social media, enterprises will be encouraging their customers to be lured away by competitors that are increasingly interacting with those customers in the ways that the customers want to communicate," said Naik.