Cognitive computing – Transforming business analytics with Watson

Published November 29, 2016   |   

Managing business data is a big trend right now. Through a couple of clicks and a couple drags, anybody can explore it.

Businesses have been collecting and analyzing data since the 1950s. Data is the prime factor for businesses in order to gather information and related analysis to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and serve their customers.

You might be wondering, why one must care about Data Analysis, in particular? The answer to the question is pretty obvious, i.e. most of the time you use data – allocation and progression of work, individual employee performance, customer feedback, campaign results and more.

Long Back, analysts had to laboriously indulge in a pile of spreadsheets, go back and forth, in order to evaluate the ultimate data insight. This final analysis is kept as a bookmark for knowing the efficiency, work output of the company in order to serve the customers. However, by the changing time, changed the nature of data analysis. The modern analysis tools make instant regulation on the organization’s work efficiency, thereby always obtainable at customers reach.

Watson Analytics, without a second thought, is the prime solution for easy solving of analytics. This tool enables you to visualize, explore, and act on, all of the data at your fingertips—quickly and all on your own, enabling companies a leg up on their competition. Watson is helping them drive their individual business in a better way, by actually drilling into what’s important, just by being able to type in a question.

What is Watson Analytics?

The word Analytics is made easy, even for a beginner with the invention of IBM Watson, in 2011. Organizations can now easily uncover automated data analysis, visualization and predictive analytics.

IBM Watson was specifically developed to compete against humans and answer questions on Jeopardy, a quiz show held at a centenary function of IBM. This supercomputer was a collection of computing, algorithm, and analytics to answer logical and toughest questions, just like a human brain.

This cognitive computing has been getting frequent significance since last 5 years. In the meanwhile, it has emerged as a replacement for Data Scientist. It performs sophisticated data discovery and analysis without any complexity involved. The whole Watson tool is aimed to substitute the use of spreadsheets for analysis.

Watson Analytics lays a foundation for powerful analytics capabilities without any need of downloading software, so practically anyone can use it. Automated data analysis, visualization, predictive analytics, enables the analyst to take control of the overall analysis. Subsequently, proceed for appropriate action to address a problem or seize an opportunity, all without asking help from IT or data expert.

Why Watson Analytics?

In today’s marketing world, business professionals barely make use of analytic tools as part of their decision making, because either these tools are too complex or hard to access.

The reason behind its low popularity is because these tools are not made specifically for business users, but for assisting technical people to develop customized solutions for end users.

The whole purpose behind the invention of Watson Analytics is to formulate the analytical experience to help a businessperson, in making better decisions with better insight.

What can Watson Analytics do for you? 

What can Watson analytics do for you?

Explore Watson Analytics 

  • Easy analytics for marketers

Watson Analytics is making advanced analytics an everyday tool for Marketing Professionals.

To truly take your marketing efforts to the next level, to confidently target potential customers, nurturing relationships and designing smart campaigns, you need advanced analytics.

Watson Analytics significantly creates and proposes visualizations for your manual questions, to help you quickly spot customer buying and behavior trends and untapped campaign opportunities.

  • Easy analytics for sales

By using Watson Analytics, you just need to upload your data to acquire the results you need.

Automated analytics and visualizations give you a clear view with the help of graphical patterns and trends, which otherwise cannot be seen in a sales and revenue report table.

You can even make an effortless dashboard creation with important insights and create infographics that tell compelling sales performance stories.

Automated Analytics find factors most likely to contribute to either your wins or losses. So with Watson Analytics, an approach to final decisions have gone from strategy making to measurable objective data in terms of creating pricing to deliver the best value to customers.

  • Easy analytics for IT

Watson workspace provides a free platform to create dashboards with deeper insight, for your IT team, followed by infographics, to put together a captivating picture of your IT infrastructure, technical allocation, and helpdesk resolutions.

  • Easy analytics for operations

With Watson Analytics, result-oriented decision-making is made simpler. Automated analytics carry operations for solving out inventory problems, and other operational outcomes by providing visualizations to show visual trends which might not be seen in tables of maintenance data.

  • Easy analytics for HR

Watson Analytics allows users to spend more time analyzing data without any waiting for requests to be processed by IT.

It provides a platform to uncover critical insights about past and recent prospective record of employees by simply uploading your data and obtaining the results in finding solutions to identify high performance, satisfaction and more.

  • Easy analytics for banking

You generally want to build right campaigns and attractive offers, using data to attract new and retain valuable banking customers. With IBM Watson Analytics, you can utilize analyzed analytics, to obtain the insights to make goal-oriented decisions for your bank to better reach your customers and ensure they’re the central asset of your business.

  • Easy analytics for Education

With IBM Watson Analytics, you can keep track on an improvement of individual student performance and also keep an eye on high-risk students, to put them on the right path. With an accurate and deep understanding of the data, through compelling infographics, you can approach at a solution on how best authorize students to perform the best to their ability, at the lowest possible cost.

  • Easy analytics for chemicals and petroleum

With IBM Watson Analytics, you can analyze your data to assess the health of your equipment for better function and target production so as to improve processing, lead utmost yield and ultimate business results.

  • Telecommunication

Deals with customer segmentation by analyzing channel interactions and mobility patterns. Cognitive capabilities and natural language interactions allow for better customer segment, just in minutes, with the help of advanced analytics.

  • Government

Providing citizens with their rights and safety is the primary responsibility of any government. Fulfilling the mission of the government by providing the rights and acts to the people involves a lot of churns. IBM Watson Analytics comes to rescue by better understanding the data and assisting the government under emergency. It helps you obtain advanced analytics for crime, operational and environmental issues to update people on the same and improve their living.

  • Non-profit

NGO’s deals with a pile of records containing data of volunteers, donors, recipients, and funders. Non Profits has to work on this huge list and keep track of the assistance and services they offer for various purposes.

  • Data Management 

Organizations are building modern data architectures – by achieving insight from analytics. Managing data across multiple workloads, on-premises, and cloud has become economical.

  • Data integration and Governance

Organizations are spending less time putting data to work – from agile data integration and governance to MDM, and protecting the security and privacy of their data.

How does it work?

IBM Watson analytics home page

Key Innovation features

Watson solutions provide an instant solution to a wide range of complex challenges by accelerating human expertise.

Below are the key innovations made through Watson Analytics, that enable business users to efficiently engage in advanced analytics:

  • Self-service
  • Natural Language Dialogue
  • Single Business Analytics Experience
  • Stories

Watson Analytics bring out the distinctive cognitive capabilities to accelerate the everyday analytical activities in three ways:

  • Semantic recognition of concepts in the data
  • Recommends starting points for analysis
  • Interaction in natural language

Conclusion

The overall goal is to create a new generation of technology that can evaluate answers from data more effectively than current search engines.

Watson Analytics allows just anyone to quickly discover patterns and meanings in the data without much hassle involved. Analyze the nature of customers, their necessities and determine smarter marketing campaigns, all by using IBM Watson Analytics, single solution to all your questions related to business.

The recent improvisations in Watson of IBM have evolved into a solution for some of the difficult problems in the world, today. It’s emerging as a human assistant in several functionalities including healthcare, financial and customer services.