Operational Analytics for Industry, Infrastructure, and Cities

Executive Overview
Across industry, infrastructure, and smart cities, “disruption” is the word often used to describe a fundamental of today’s digital economies. It encompasses a broad set or market characteristics that have come about due to improvements in technology. Computing power is cheap and mobile, data is ubiquitous and easier to access than ever, and physical objects can increasingly connect and communicate.

Corporate and public sector executives are deploying technologies such as smart, connected things; wireless networks; cloud computing; digital twins; and analytics to modernize, improve and transform their business processes, services, and cities. They have seen the impact of digitization in consumer markets, where mobile phones and applications completely remade the video game, music, camera, and landline phone businesses. Streaming entertainment displaced brick-and-mortar stores. Other disruptions, such as electric and autonomous vehicles, distributed energy generation and storage, and open-source education, are under way, with the full impact yet to be felt.

Analytics are central to this market disruption. While analytics aren’t new, a host of advancements in the field have redefined what analytics mean and can do. Many applications today in some way use or provide a type of analytics. Do manufacturing intelligence solutions provide (or use) analytics? What about historians and advanced process control? The diagram on page 6 attempts to position these and many more applications within the operational analytics space.

There are now many more paths to obtain improvements using data. However, there is no single, right path for industries and municipalities, nor does every operational area need to reach some transformational state of maturity. In fact, that may be overkill for parts of operations. Faced with this reality, corporate and public sector executives are finding it difficult to understand how to define, scope, and scale improvements using operational analytics. As a result, many organizations are still working through what to use, where to use it, and when to stop.

Table of Contents

• Executive Overview

• Why Companies Focus on Analytics

• Many Paths to Operational Improvement

• Technology Overshadows Objectives

• Mapping Analytics to a Maturity Model

• Value of Iterative Improvement

• Recommendations

   

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Keywords: Smart Cities, Digital Economies, Connected Things, Wireless Networks, Cloud Computing, Digital Twins, Analytics, Mobile Phones, ARC Advisory Group.