What are Real Time Analytics?
There’s no denying that the world we work in has sped up and in turn the COVID pandemic sped up the development of many technologies and processes to allow work to continue in extreme circumstances. We are at a point where companies need to be able to react to customers’ changing behaviours and need to be able to respond to global events because delays in decision making could prove costly in more ways than one. And that’s why real time data is becoming an important trend. For any company wanting to keep up with the competition, real time analytics has an indispensable tool.
Real time data analytics (or streaming analytics as it is also known) gives a user the ability to capture, analyse and use data as soon as it appears in a system in a format such as a report or a dashboard that is understandable to analyze. Retailers are able to see what is trending in their sales, finance companies can detect fraud at the point of sale, social media can detect fake news or identify bullying language that needs to be acted upon, our smartwatches can analyse our heart beats and traffic apps can report on problems as they occur.
Being able to react quickly to a problem, adjust the price of a product, react to a user’s website click decisions or target an ad for a specific audience based on their actions improves customer engagement and loyalty.
Where is the information coming from? It is being streamed from such things as website clicks, GPS, video views, sensors and transaction logs. It may seem that such data collecting is out of the reach of smaller businesses. Streaming does require a lot of resources. It is after all a never ending flow of information with a time limit on its usefulness, but real time data services are available from companies including Amazon and IBM. You can subscribe to their services to access information logs from various sources meaning any company can have access to data that will allow them to make smart and timely decisions.
