What Are Actionable Insights?

I was delighted when so many sites picked up this simple presentation I've put together to describe what Actionable Insights are.

I think there is a great deal of confusion at the moment around the entire technology space because people are hearing whispers of BIG DATA, CLOUD, PREDICTIVE AND SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE and the like...  and what they really want to know is what any or all of these technologies have to do with their business.

For Business Intelligence Software vendors, it's not always easy to answer the 'So What?' questions when it comes to applying their technology; particularly when the people making the introductions are enthusiasts of technology - and they generally are.  If you are passionate about technology like me, you just want to shout out to everyone in the world "Hey, give this a try!" but every business, and business user has a different perspective on 'what insights matter most to them'.  Failing to appreciate and land on the specific insights useful to buyers and instead making a general technology silver-bullet pitch is an all too familiar Lion Pit that Business Intelligence vendors fall into.

This presentation covers descriptions of types of Business Intelligence software and the key outcome areas that are driving demand for Actionable Insights.  I've covered a lot of the background and technology issues in this presentation that I think are most helpful in understanding the general topic area. What I haven't done is to even start to describe the road-blocks and organizational design issues that are probably going to make the biggest difference to the value of Actionable Insights to early adopters of the technologies designed to source them.

These are about:

• Changing attitudes and behaviors.
• Appreciating that IT systems have focused for years inwardly on processes that exist WITHIN AND ACROSS the enterprise but rarely beyond it.  That means to really get to grips with harvesting and assimilating actionable insights new technologies need to be introduced along with new thinking on security governance, data governance, scaling and analysis tooling.
• Accepting that some Actionable Insights that are most valuable to an enterprise aren't being captured today at all (such as 'soft-measures').
• Some Actionable Insights don't have any specific role in the enterprise responsible and accountable for making use of them. 

I.