Talent shortage slows Spore use of analytics

By David R. Hardoon, Principal for Analytics, SAS Singapore | Sep 16, 2011

With the explosion of social media, Singapore organizations are hard-pressed at making sense of all the unstructured data coming in from various channels to aid them in making business decisions.

Explosion of social data
With growing broadband penetration, more consumers are going online to seek information as well as share views on brands and their products. It is hardly surprising social media has become an integral platform on which companies engage with customers and stakeholders today. With this explosion of social data, we expect strong growth in social media analytics.

These tools will allow organizations to listen to online consumer conversations and gain a better understanding of consumers’ behavior and opinions.

Using SAS’s social media analytics solution, we recently tracked Twitter discussions around Singapore’s General Elections the day before the election date. The results provided an overview of public sentiment about the constituencies, participating parties and individual candidates for that particular day. We found that George Yeo, Chiam See Tong, Nicole Seah, Aljunied GRC and the People Action’s Party were the most talked about topics, with varying sentiments captured. This is an example of how organisations can use social media analytics to collect feedback, and subsequently optimize their campaigns.

Answers in minutes instead of hours
The previous example was a simple exercise; imagine needing to analyse massive amounts of data to quickly answer complex business questions. On a day to day basis, financial institutions are tackling mammoth risk management analyses involving billions of calculations, while retailers must determine optimal prices for vast numbers of products across hundreds of store locations. Traditional computing infrastructures and techniques simply can’t keep up.

In response to this growing problem, high-performance computing (HPC), which enables the much faster analysis of big volumes of data, is gaining traction. In a HPC environment, what would usually take hours to analyse is slashed to just a few minutes.

Lack of widespread adoption in Singapore
However, these advanced analytics implementations require a strong foundation in business analytics. As a country, while we may be considered advanced in comparison to our neighbours, we are still a fair number of years behind the West. In order for organizations here to be competitive with global standards, it is imperative that business analytics takes root.