The modern business is under assault from all sides: connected consumers, disruptive ideas, global competitors, new technologies. How does the CIO step up and be the executive the business requires to get them where they need to be? Today’s analytics is not that of ve years ago. Modern solutions are increasingly providing real-time feedback on market trends as well as helping with error prediction. Kevin Govender, GM: IT strategy and enterprise architecture, Transnet, says analytics has helped Transnet improve its maintenance schedules. “Traditional analytics looks at historical data, but looking at that historical data is not necessarily how you look at trends. Part of what we’re doing on the maintenance side is to put in sensors to pick up whether components are in or out of tolerance.”

Desan Naidoo, regional director: Southern Africa, SAS, says access to data is changing many established markets. “What we have noticed is that the market has moved from asking why to asking how: how do companies adopt analytics? What are the use cases? So it’s no longer how to convince customers that they require analytics, but, rather, working with them to implement it. We’re also seeing it as disruptive to traditional business models. Organisations that have been running for decades are now being challenged because of access to data and analytics of data.”