By Yoo Jae-oh

As Big Data has recently been at the center of public concerns, there has been a surge of enthusiasm for analytics among companies. Many companies agree that analytics will become a core competency that companies must have to survive in the future. Nevertheless, the reality is that there are many people who get confused about how Big Data is differentiated from Business Intelligence (BI), which has been utilized by leading companies for past decades. Furthermore, there are lots of companies who have taken an even more skeptical view on Big Data if they have failed with their investment through BI introduction.

According to a recent Accenture survey, research suggests that many foreign companies failed to achieve targeted benefits with BI investment, and South Korea will have higher failure rates. Without the descriptive analytics competence, it is practically impossible for companies to have the predictive analytics competence with their own strengths. Therefore, they need to look back to understand the reasons for failure.

Among many of the success factors, the most fundamental thing is to establish company culture and organization enabling analytical competency from a long-term point of view. Most companies misunderstand that the analytical capability will arise by default if they build the process and the system. So they ignore the process of changing the company culture and instead, close BI projects as a one-time project.

Through BI implementation, executives wish for employees to start working analytically from that point on, however employees keep working overtime and become consumed with heavy workloads to meet the ad-hoc demands of data analysis. Because of this approach, the current status of analytical capability in Korean companies is falling behind from other advanced companies and the differentiated know-how that arises from implementing predictive analytics is not achieved.

The approach of Korean companies, which are used to getting results with a single investment, will not work in analytics. They have to reorganize to establish a long-term plan to enhance the competence of descriptive analytics and predictive analytics. Moreover, it is absolutely necessary to have support from and to actively change the mindset of the C-Suite. In those stages of development, I assure that a company will find its own differentiated way to utilize Big Data.

Yoo Jae-oh is geographical unit delivery leader at Accenture Korea Technology Growth Platform.