There has been a lot of discussion recently around advanced analytics. I’d like to throw my definition into the rink. I spent many years at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s and 1990s deploying what I would call advanced analytics. This included utilizing statistical and mathematical models to understand customer behavior, predict retention, or analyze trouble tickets. It also included new approaches for segmenting the customer base and thinking about how to analyze call streams in real time. We also tried to utilize unstructured data from call center logs to help improve the predictive power of our retention models, but the algorithms and the compute power didn’t exist at the time to do this.

Based on my own experiences as well as what I see happening in the market today as an analyst, I view advanced analytics as an umbrella term that includes a class of techniques and practices that go well beyond “slicing and dicing and shaking and baking” data for reports. I would define advanced analytics as:

“Advanced analytics provides algorithms for complex analysis of either structured or unstructured data. It includes sophisticated statistical models, machine learning, neural networks, text analytics, and other advanced data mining techniques. Among its many use cases, it can be deployed to find patterns in data, prediction, optimization, forecasting, and for complex event processing/analysis. Examples include predicting churn, identifying fraud, market basket analysis, or understanding website behavior. Advanced analytics does not include database query and reporting and OLAP cubes. “

Of course, the examples in this definition are marketing-centric and advanced analytics obviously extends into multiple arenas. Hurwitz & Associates is going to do a deep dive into this area in the coming year. We are currently fielding a study about advanced analytics and we’ll be producing additional reports. For those of you who are interested in completing my survey, here is the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5S8RT65