Our study reveals that the next critical stage in the evolution of the analytics platform – i.e. organizations moving analytics to the cloud – is in progress in the Asia-Pacific. Migrating analytics to the cloud can help organizations increase business agility, lower IT costs, standardize IT platforms, and accelerate innovation.

Yet, the biggest challenge faced by Asia-Pacific organizations lies in their struggle to realize value from analytic models. Almost all our respondents took more than 3 months to put their best-defined models into operation, while more than half of the models they created were not put into production at all – because they lacked the right methodology, data and analytics governance frameworks, and relevant in-house skills.

To overcome the challenges in operationalizing analytics, organizations will need to adopt an analytics lifecycle approach that extends from data, to discovery, and to deployment. Organizations should deploy powerful, easy-to-use platforms that help prepare data, create accurate models, validate and retrain these models throughout the analytics lifecycle. Ultimately, organizations need to convert data into insights – and finally into action – by integrating accurate models into production.