Capitalize on Consumerization
Consumerization of information technology continues to gain momentum in the marketplace. Consumerization today takes several forms, including “app stores,” crowdsourcing, and BYO (bring your own).
B2B app stores and markets have analytic apps emerging. Some of these apps are very narrow, discrete use cases, such as a credit scoring formula, whereas other apps are more comprehensive end-to-end use cases, such as multichannel marketing attribution. Although none of these may be a complete 100% fit, they can provide a starting point to speed up time to insight and drive down costs.
Crowdsourcing is a type of outsourcing through which an enterprise solicits contributions from an online community to perform a specific task. Crowdsourcing analytic models or algorithms provide access and leverage of outside expertise that would be difficult or impossible to access at an economical rate.
The “bring your own” era of self-service is well underway with analytic professionals who are demanding to use their favorite tools, data sources, and models rather than the standard information technology or mandated equivalents. Although information technology typically seeks to standardize and consolidate vendors and tools for cost and ease of support, analytic professionals typically value other considerations, such as user interface ease of use, flexibility to tailor via programming interfaces, and breadth of analytic models. Out of this tension has arisen the self-service approach to bringing your own:
- Data (BYOD)
- Tools (BYOT)
- Models (BYOM)
BYOD—bring your own data—is a way for organizations to combine their noncompetitive data to discover patterns and derive insights with new rich data sources. BYOT—bring your own tools—is a way to mix and match open source and proprietary technology tools to address specific service-level agreement requirements. BYOM—bring your own models—is a way to leverage app stores and crowdsourcing to derive value.