Several weeks ago, Hurwitz & Associates deployed a short survey entitled, “Four questions about innovations in analysis”.  Well, the results and they are quite interesting!

THE SURVEY

First, a few words about the survey itself and who responded to the survey.

1. We wanted to make the survey short and sweet.  We were interested in what  kinds of analytical technology companies thought were important and specifically how companies were using text analytics to analyze unstructured information.  Finally, since there has been a lot of buzz about analyzing social media we asked about this, as well
2. Let me say up front that given the nature of our list, I would categorize most of the respondents to the survey as fairly technology savvy.  In all,  61 people responded to the survey, 32% of these respondents were from high technology companies.  The verticals included professional services, followed by manufacturing, financial/insurance, healthcare and pharmaceutical. There were also some responses from governmental agencies, telecommunications and energy companies.  So, while the results are unscientific in terms of a random sample across all companies, they probably do reflect the intentions of potential early adopters, although not in a statistically significant manner.
3. In analyzing the results, I first looked at the overall picture and then examined individual verticals as well as filtered the results by other attributes (such as those using text analytics vs. those not using the technology) to get a feel for what these companies were thinking about and whether one group was different from another.  These subgroups are of course, quite small and the results should be viewed accordingly.

THE RESULTS

 We first asked all of the respondents to rate a number of technologies in terms of importance to their companies.  Figure 1 shows the results.  Overall, most of these technologies were at least somewhat important to this technology savvy group, with query and reporting leading the pack.  This isn’t surprising.  Interestingly, OLAP data cubes appeared to be the least important analytical technology – at least with this group of respondents.  Other technologies, such as performance management, predictive modeling, and visualization ranked fairly high, as well.  Again not surprisingly, text analytics ranked lower than some of the other technologies probably since it is just moving out of the early adopter stage.  Some of the respondents, from smaller firms, had no idea what any of these technologies were.  And, in terms of text analytics, one company commented, ” yeekes, this must be big time company kind of stuff. Way up in the clouds here, come down to earth.” They, no doubt, are still using Excel and Access for their analytical needs.  Other smaller companies were very interested in “non-cube” technologies such as some of the visualization products on the market today.