Status quo of advanced and predictive analytics

A recent study by the Business Application Research Center (Barc) shed light on companies' current and planned use of advanced analytics:

Nine percent consider the topic to be very important - twice as many as in last year's survey. 63 percent consider it to be very important in the future. However, the number of companies using advanced analytics is stagnating.

Only five percent already use this technology frequently, 31 percent sporadically - about the same number as last year. Although the willingness to invest in the topic has increased over the past year, most companies are still reluctant to make concrete investments.

Domain-driven companies are predominantly in the use case identification and prototype evaluation phase, while data scientist- and IT-driven companies are more in the prototyping phase.

The former use advanced analytics to support decision-making (18 percent), but not for process automation (0 percent). For data lab and IT-driven companies, however, this automation is a focus (13 percent).

This suggests that the knowledge of professional data scientists and of IT vis-à-vis the specialist department also permits other use cases, or that advanced analytics is used by specialist departments with significantly different expectations.

The benefits realized in advanced analytics projects amount to a three percent increase in revenue and a two percent reduction in costs. In the future, users expect values of eight percent and nine percent respectively.

In addition, domain-driven companies see a better understanding of the competition and customers as an important added value of advanced analytics projects.