Actionable Intelligence: Next level of Big Data Analysis

Actionable intelligence means capturing of data from different sources and taking out critical insights for decision-making processes.

The journey of big data doesn’t end with the analytics of it. It goes up to the level of actionable intelligence, where the analysis of big data is put to use of decision making. This is where the real opportunity is, for the big data professionals to explore. The rate at which the usage of big data analytics is increasing is much more than the number of professionals to do the job.

What is Actionable intelligence and how is it related to big data?

Actionable intelligence has big data inside it.

• Actionable intelligence means capturing of data from different sources. It could be a video, text, chat, voice and other such mechanisms. 
• The data from different sources is accumulated and then we process that data. Once that is done, we look at analyzing that data and take out critical insights from that.
• Those critical insights are given to the decision makers for facilitating the decision making process.

When it comes to differentiating big data and actionable intelligence, the former is referred to while collecting information from different sources, scrubbing that data with fusion and processing it. Deriving the critical insights is not termed as big data.

How different is actionable intelligence from artificial intelligence?

These are two different fields all together.  Actionable intelligence, as I said, can be applied to any kind of communication which could be written communication, text, email, web chats and others. It could be voice communication, which is to say with our interaction that we do over our contact centre. It could be emails and other such things, which is also part of our communication and video chats of course. So, that’s where you accumulate all of that data and then you put intelligence around it.

Artificial intelligence is more about robotics. In this, a process is completely automated rather than just analyzing what the intelligence is. There’s no human intervention in between and the intelligence which is gathered from big data is given out and the job is completed without human intervention.

IBM CEO recently said – ‘It’s no longer about being a digital business; it is about a cognitive business’. What is your take on that?

Cognitive business or cognitive sciences, as we can call it, is evolving as of now. I don’t see it in terms of commercial adoption yet but it is still in the evolution stage. What you see people using on a day to day basis largely is actionable intelligence.