SupplyWorx Vol 15.6

 Investment Advantage, Africa of Things  Internet The Data-Driven Business Era

 Burnout

Best Stopped Before It Starts

 Illegitimate emails

Evolving into something dangerous

 Absenteeism

Eroding company profits

 Nobody Likes a Whistleblower The risks involved

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Africa dvantage

Africa is finally taking centre stage as more and more international organisations are opening offices on the continent. More banks are viewing Africa with interest, and stock markets are showing strong performances.

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ouise Robinson, Sales Director at CG Consulting says investing in Africa is a must for all enterprises wishing to succeed in the future. “Africa is already showing one of the highest returns on investment. African banks did not take the same knocks as their US and European counterparts during the recession, and the interest in Africa remains strong.”

She acknowledges that Africa is not without its problems, particularly in terms of infrastructure, poor transport, low electricity penetration and so on. “However, investment in the continent can fix this. Africa is so resource rich, that investors will put infrastructure in place to be able to tap into them.”

The African Economist cited figures from the African Development Bank that revealed that by 2030, the majority of African countries will have attained lower-middle to middle-class majorities, and that consumer spending will explode to about USD2.2 trillion.

Robinson points out that the burgeoning world population, estimated to reach 8.3 billion by 2030, will also offer Africa some enormous opportunities, as the demand for resources will reach previously undreamed of levels. “By 2035 it is estimated that more of the global workforce will be

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African, overtaking even superpowers such as China. Africa is also set to enjoy a major role in meeting consumer needs across the globe.”

The next ten years will be an out of the ordinary time for Africa. The global economic axis is shifting, and Africa is set to shine. “There will be swings and roundabouts, but those who do not see the changes afoot, and refuse to view Africa as the next place to be will be missing a giant business opportunity.”

Robinson indicates that projected economic growth is just one of the reasons why foreigners should consider starting up or expanding their existing businesses into Africa – especially in the ICT sector. “The nascent technology scene is starting to grow. While Internet usage remains fairly low across the region, mobile penetration is high, with even the poorer African countries boasting mobile rates of around 85%.”

She points out that the most important consideration for any business looking to invest in an African business is that they have to walk a fine line between accepting local business customs and following good business practices.

“What is appropriate in Lagos may not be in Nairobi, or Johannesburg. Similarly, Africa has a bad reputation for corruption, so an investor must have a good enough understanding of where the two meet in order to evaluate the potential success of any African business. Having a local advisory or consulting firm on board can make or break any deal, and can mean the difference between investing in the next Mark Zuckerberg or in a 419 scam.”

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The Challenge of

illegitimate

emails

When the Web was in its infancy, spam was a minor annoyance and not much more. However, as with all other aspects of the Web, spam has evolved into something far more dangerous that is costing business enormously in terms of bandwidth, productivity and downtime.

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o get a handle on the size of the spam problem, we need to look at the tidal wave of unsolicited emails that is drowning an enterprise,” says John Mc Loughlin, MD of J2 Software. “Reports estimate that as much as 80% of the billions of emails sent on a daily basis are spam. These illegitimate mails clog up and waste expensive bandwidth, put strain on servers, and waste time and money delivering these emails to the intended mailboxes, and even more in sifting through them.”

He says J2 conducted an investigation across its email user base to see if the research was correct in an African context. “When we looked at J2 Software’s customers using Mimecast, we saw that email rejections of SPAM, dangerous attachments and other illegitimate emails blocked in the cloud totalled an average of 1 905 459 a week, adding up to some 7.6 million emails being rejected monthly just on the J2 Software customer base. These emails were rejected and never filtered down to our clients, saving them enormously in terms of both bandwidth and time spent sorting the wheat from the chaff.”

Mc Loughlin cites research done by the Radicati Group as showing the average size of an email without an attachment to be 26KB. “This translates into savings in excess of 47GB for our client base.”

He says over and above losses of bandwidth and productivity, spam can be dangerous in other ways. “Spam emails will also often try to trick the recipient into following links to malicious websites or to download dangerous applications which can then be used to target the business or individual by stealing sensitive information. By blocking and therefore preventing these mails form reaching our clients we have helped ensure that there is no chance of human error in infecting the corporate network.”

He adds that email is also still the most common vector for spreading malware, and that in addition to distributing dangerous applications, this sort of spam could crash your system and in turn the systems of people you email, or log your keystrokes to steal your financial login details.”

These illegitimate mails clog up and waste expensive bandwidth, put strain on servers, and waste time and money.

Phishing is another tactic that spammers use. “The cyber criminal will send out an email that is so close in appearance to the genuine article that it would fool all but the closest scrutiny. Phishing mails attempt to trick the recipient into clicking on a link and filling in their private financial information. Not only are bank accounts cleaned out in this way, but the cost of identity theft resulting from phishing can also run into the millions.”

The risks associated with spam and other illegitimate mail grows daily – spammers are continually adapting to try and bypass new methods of detection. This can cost not only money, but customers and reputation.

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Burnout stopped

is best

before it

starts

Managing stress and burnout in employees lowers absenteeism rates, increases productivity and decreases the costs associated with high staff turnover.

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ccording to the latest study from the Top Employers Institute, certified Top Employers in South Africa have a lower than average absenteeism rate, with the five lowest averaging at just 1.5%. This is on a completely different scale to the rest of the country.

HR Future magazine reports that in the average company, approximately 4,5% of the workforce is absent on any given day and in some companies this figure is as high as 18%. The magazine’s independent research estimates that the rise in absenteeism in South Africa is costing the economy as much as R12 billion per year.

Not surprisingly, dealing with this challenge is high on the agenda of most HR managers and the good ones are getting it right.

According to Samantha Crous, the Top Employers Institute’s regional director for Africa & Benelux, nearly 50% of certified Top Employers in South Africa have a burnout recovery programme in place, and 79% have a stress management programme. “Furthermore, Top Employers comfortably exceed the legal minimum of leave days (15 annually), with the majority offering between 21 – 26 days on a sliding scale from support staff to executives, which allow employees ample recovery time to recharge,” points out Crous.

Other tactics include flexible work arrangements where employees can either work reduced hours or plan their days appropriately to balance work and life, a perk that is offered to Microsoft employees, says Microsoft’s HR Business Partner Hellen Mabasa. Microsoft is one of the top ten employers in the country and is also certified as a Top Employer in Africa.

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According to Elizabeth Scott, M.S., periods of intensely demanding work need not lead to burnout, but can in fact do the opposite if managed correctly.

“We also offer sabbatical and personal leave of absence for those who need to take extended leave from work. We encourage our employees to take leave regularly to recharge their batteries,” says Mabasa.

At Nestlé, another Top Employer, the emphasis on employee wellness is paramount. “Our employment and working conditions support our ambitions of being a leading Nutrition Health and Wellness company,” says Employee Wellness Manager Vicky Jowitt. “Nestlé employees in Bryanston work in a building that is environmentally friendly with natural light, indigenous vegetation and pause areas to take regular breaks.

“Our crèche with baby feeding facilities allows for Nestlé mums to nourish their babies whilst at work, and work-life balance is supported by flexible working conditions.”

In addition to more broad-spectrum wellness and work-life balance programmes, many of the top employers actively focus on ensuring that immune systems remain strong and that employees do not reach a stage where they cannot cope with their workloads.

At Accenture, there’s an even more creative approach to managing loss of productivity by ensuring employees don’t waste company time on life admin – and that they don’t use precious downtime on it, either. Spokesperson for the company’s Total Rewards programme Kathy Pillay explains that the company has in place “a concierge driver service that will pick up and deliver dry cleaning, documents, post, et cetera for all employees, and an on-call PA 24-hours a day that will help source various products and services including travel packages, appliance prices, plumbers, et cetera.” There is also homework support for the children of employees. In terms of health, there are free wellness checks at least once a year and various disease management programmes are in place.

Crous says that the success of these interventions can be measured by the lowered rate of absenteeism. “There are limited means of measuring the return on investment in an organisation’s work-life balance or wellness programme. But

while productivity can be difficult to measure, absenteeism is difficult to overlook - it’s in black and white and it can be costly to companies,” she says.

According to Forbes.com, the total annual cost of lost productivity due to absenteeism in the US is close to $84 billion.

In South Africa, 3.96 million workers took sick leave during 2013, according to Moneyweb. This is up from 0.7 million in 2000, representing an increase of 466%.

“In this business environment, companies need to act to ensure lower absenteeism rates. Introducing wellness and work-life balance programmes is an obvious solution,” says Crous. “One study cited in Taylor & Francis Online notes that employees taking part in a fitness and wellness pilot programmes reduced absenteeism by 22%, while improving their attitude towards their work environment. Staff turnover was reduced and productivity increased – and this only during a six-month trial.”

Nestlé certainly makes use of this principle. “Our gym and fitness activities, combined with our nutritional communication and healthy staff restaurant, all help to ensure that employees get an opportunity to take care of their personal wellness,” says Jowitt.

According to Elizabeth Scott, M.S., periods of intensely demanding work need not lead to burnout, but can in fact do the opposite if managed correctly – these “crunch times” can be invigorating and lead to increased energy and focus, provided there is a recovery period afterwards and sufficient compensation and recognition. Companies can therefore use stress to their advantage. Scott recommends “sprints”, where employees work hard and intensely on stimulating projects, alternating with periods of recognition and recovery.

“The emphasis should be on maximising employees’ drive and focus with a mixture of stimulation, recovery, recognition and health,” says Crous. “We need to remember that quality is infinitely better than quantity when it comes to working hours.”

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absenteeism:

Eroding Company Profits

by CGF Institute

As the world economy struggles to regain its former pace and growth since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, companies and their leadership may have overlooked a growing area of risk which could be costing them dearly. In almost all cases companies are able to count their losses in, for example, a line item which has an attached tangible value on their balance sheet from one period to the next. And these losses − or profits as the case may be − are invariably linked to a known risk which has been, or is still in the process of being managed.

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he point being that whether such a loss (or profit) is made, is normally directly linked, defined and clearly understood by the people responsible for ensuring the financial health of a company. Indeed, these people – who comprise the chief executive officer, the financial director and even the internal auditors − are generally considered the core leadership team who are responsible for the proper governance of the company’s daily operations, which entails both the financial and non-financial aspects of the company.

Whilst there have been numerous corporate governance recommendations documented across the world, notably those such as the King Report on Governance for South Africa 2009 (King III) which emphasises the need for integrated reporting amongst other issues; one can’t help but wonder whether or not the company’s leadership have sufficiently applied their minds and reported the costs attached to their Human Capital, especially when employees are absent from their workstations and without proper permission?

In many companies, Human Capital has been considered a ‘soft issue’ and not much attention is allocated to this

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critical ‘asset’, unless of course there is a blatant problem, say for example a looming strike or a contagious health outbreak amongst employees or worse, the death of an employee.

Clearly these types of examples pose tremendous risks to a company and its sustainability, and they are not such ‘soft issues’ especially when the business’ continuity is negatively affected. On the contrary, whilst these risks – which are quite obvious and visible – can also have significant impact upon a company’s productivity and its profits, there is yet a further risk which is much greater than these already mentioned, namely absenteeism.

At the face of it, absenteeism may initially be completely undetected, and in fact not known about, or completely misunderstood and not managed. In many respects, absenteeism can be likened to a ‘silent cancer’ that slowly erodes the company’s profits, productivity, morale and even its culture. In the workplace, absenteeism is one of the most common problems facing South African (‘SA’) companies and it is estimated to be costing the South African economy – according to the South African Chamber of Commerce (SACOB)

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– between R12bn to R20bn each year. In its most common the past decade. Considering these facts, companies need form, employees will claim to be ‘sick’ and then stay away from to not only address their management and policy processes, their workplace to maximise their days for annual sick leave, but they may also need to consider the reasons behind and even exceed their benefits well beyond reason. Expectedly, absenteeism and which appear to be escalating this trend. an unsuspecting company may not at first easily detect such Some of the reasons cited by employees that exacerbate abuse against the company (especially in larger companies and absenteeism include: state owned entities), mainly because the stay-away may have  poor income levels of employees, appeared legitimate as the employee may have produced a  poor communications and relations between doctor’s certificate to validate their ‘illness’. management and employees, But absenteeism need not necessarily mean that an  poorly managed workplace disciplinary procedures, employee has to physically be away from their employer’s  unincentivised employer productivity programmes, premises without their employer’s permission. Absenteeism  poor working conditions and/or the boring or repetitive also covers instances where employees are physically away nature of work, and from their work stations and are therefore unable to fulfill unfavourable geographic location of the workplace and/or their obligations to their employer. Such circumstances workstation. include the employee habitually arriving late or leaving Finally, caution must be exercised by companies who work early; taking extended tea, lunch or toilet breaks; may choose a more draconian approach to stamp out taking excessive and unreasonable time to complete work absenteeism. Remember of course that an employee has assignments and attending to personal issues such as many rights (as does the company) and these are essentially shopping during working hours. found in our constitution, our common law, the Basic The average absenteeism rate amongst SA companies Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997 and the Labour is conservatively estimated between 3.5 and 6 per cent per Relations Act 66 of 1995 amongst other legislation. No matter annum, and with its increasing trends, suggests it may be a how your company may wish to address this escalating growing crisis within companies and the economy. And with problem, sadly, research suggests that notwithstanding the the recent Reserve Bank announcement that South Africa most noble sickness-management systems and programmes was unable to attain a full one per cent (1%) GDP in the first being implemented, few companies have effectively managed quarter of this year; it’s clear that an unhealthy, lethargic to solve this problem which is eroding the company’s profits. workforce is not going to assist to rapidly improve this dire Perhaps companies should be involving their employees situation. Companies who are plagued with this scourge, more fully into the company’s strategy and explain to and more particularly those who do not take proactive them how they will personally stand to benefit from the action to remedy the situation, will most certainly feel the direct and indirect effects on their bottom Let us also not be tempted to believing line earnings. Some of the expenses linked directly with absenteeism include payments for employees that absenteeism occurs only amongst the who are not at work, increased insurance premiums, lower-level workers; it also happens amongst additional salary compensations, benefit payouts, or paying for employees who are at work but who are professional employees. ‘disengaged’ and therefore not adding to the overall profits of the company (presenteeism). company’s overall performance? This may change the Let us also not be tempted to believing that absenteeism employee’s attitude toward the company and hopefully occurs only amongst the lower-level workers; it also happens they will be more willing to support the company with amongst professional employees, and is sometimes worse better workplace attendance and personal performance at the higher levels compared to what is recorded at the within a shared stakeholder governance model. Of course lower ranks. Whilst there is limited research published in SA there’s no telling what the outcome will be if the company is regarding the management or control of ‘sickness’ absence, continually posting losses, or if the employee is also going to according to the Adcorp Employment Index (April 2012), be held responsible with management when productivity is there has been a four-fold increase in absenteeism due to down? But then again, the company also has its rights, and sickness since 2007. Moreover, in 2001, whilst 0.7 percent employees who are caught defrauding the company of time of SA employees were absent from work due to sickness, through this malicious practice could find themselves facing this percentage increased to 3.4 percent in 2011 despite no disciplinary action, being placed on terms, or simply fired notable increase in the number of people employed over once they have been proved guilty.

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Nobody likes a

By Ernesto Reuben

In 2002, Cynthia Cooper, then a vice president at WorldCom, presented evidence of massive fraud that she had uncovered to the audit committee of her firm’s board of directors. Executives, she found, had improperly inflated the company’s profits by billions of dollars. For having the “exceptional guts” to speak up, Time magazine named Cooper, along with Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins, among its Persons of the Year.

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et whistleblowers are not always celebrated. Reporting another’s lies can also arouse a negative response, including demotions and harassment. Even a whistleblower like Cooper, lauded by some, may face blowback from others. “Some people who used to smile and chat with Cooper and her team by the coffee maker,” wrote Time in 2002, “don’t do that anymore.”

So under what circumstances is someone likely to risk the wrath and expose a coworker’s deception? For businesses to protect their bottom lines, it’s an important question. “It’s expensive for firms to monitor all of their

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employees for corruption,” Professor Ernesto Reuben says. As an alternative, a company can create a work environment in which employees are more likely to report a dishonest colleague. Then, the threat of getting caught may prove enough of a deterrent to prevent fraud.

Reuben, along with doctoral candidate Matthew Stephenson, set up an experiment designed to better understand the circumstances that lead people to lie or report others for lying. In particular, the researchers were interested in understanding how individuals behave when they know their actions will be public and that their peers may hold their activities against them.

For the experiment, each participant was given a number representing her true income and asked to declare it publicly. She then received a payout based on her reported income. A player seeking a higher payout could simply lie by overstating the number she had been given. The only real check was her peers. Each participant had also been assigned to a small group, within which all members knew each other’s incomes. If one of them reported her for lying, she would be heavily sanctioned.

After three rounds, one member was randomly removed from the group. In some cases, as they had been told would happen, these participants were randomly reassigned to other groups. In others, the experimenters asked the remaining players to select whom to let in. To make the choice, they were given information about the candidates, including whether those participants had blown the whistle on anyone in their previous groups.

For the researchers, some of the results were not surprising.

When there was random reassignment, 32 percent of the lies were reported, making it a risky gamble to overstate one’s earnings. Yet in groups in which participants knew they might have to rely on their fellow players to get back in the game, the amount of reporting dropped to 17 percent. As those games wore on, deceptive teams formed in which lying was prevalent and no one was reported for it.

What surprised Reuben was the extent of the price the rare whistleblowers paid in the selection stage, where even honest participants who hadn’t overstated their incomes tended to block whistleblowers from joining their group. There are a few possible reasons for this, the researchers say. It could be that even people who told the truth about their own salaries understood that they might be tempted to lie under the right circumstances and, in that case, they would rather not have a whistleblower around. It’s also possible that they resented those who reported on their peers as being too self-righteous.

Either way, it may help explain why actual whistleblowers have faced difficulties, even when management is supportive of their actions. “There are certain social interactions that firms can’t control,” says Reuben, “like whether or not someone feels comfortable or is accepted by his colleagues.”

Reuben’s research underscores that businesses must consider the barriers whistleblowers may face and be prepared to help manage them. Specifically, says Reuben, companies may want to mimic his experiment to discourage employees from lying in the first place. “Firms can try to replicate the random reassignment by moving people around from one group or department to another,” Reuben says. “Some government agencies already do this to prevent corruption. While it may have a small impact on productivity, this technique is useful in preventing the high costs of fostering an environment where deception is permissible behaviour.”

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data-driven

the

business era

Since the turn of the century, the rise of social media, increasingly ubiquitous mobile devices, cloud computing, and a plethora of sensors that are linking physical objects to the ‘internet of things’, have all added an exponentially increasing volume of data that is available to business.

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his data includes a mixture of structured internal data and typically unstructured external data, encompassing voice recordings, pricing data, images, social media posts, geo-location information, and far more. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, at least six in ten companies now capture contact-centre data, including recorded conversations, staff messaging, syndicated third party data, such as weather or market information, and government data.

Just over half of those companies also collect machinegenerated data. This so-called ‘big data’ all adds to the accounting and business information that companies already collect and analyse. Although data scientists and IT experts have particular definitions for big data, we simply use this term as shorthand for the massive increase in the volume of data now being used to garner new insights into business performance, opportunities and risks (see Big data defined).

When people talk about the latest trends in big data, a lot of the excitement focuses on new forms of unstructured data. Management accountants certainly need to be alert to developments in this area. However, for most business there is still vast untapped potential in the structured data captured on their systems (enterprise data). Both these areas are important, but usually it makes sense for management accountants to start by getting to grips with enterprise data first.

According to McKinsey & Company, the growth in big data will spark a new wave of “innovation, competition, and productivity” within business. As two prominent academics

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put it, “Using big data enables managers to decide on the basis of evidence rather than intuition. For that reason it has the potential to revolutionise management”.

Technology continues to change the rules of business.

Building on the increased computerisation of the workplace that has been occurring since the late 1980s, companies are now in a digital age of business. The widespread adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP ) systems, electronic point of sale (EPOS ), e-commerce and other internet-based systems has allowed more and more organisational data to be captured digitally.

Procter & Gamble (P&G) is one example of this trend in action, where the firm’s ongoing digitisation increasingly acts as ‘a source of competitive advantage’ – helping improve everything from product innovation by analysing real-time social media comments from clients, through to using tracking data to optimise retail store layouts. P&G’s experience is borne out by broader research.

Research from the Sloan School of Management shows that companies that use ‘data-directed decision-making’ achieve a 5-6% boost in productivity. These case studies show that the opportunities arising from big data are substantial.

Against this backdrop, IT vendors are developing an evergrowing array of big data tools, ranging from new data analytics applications and executive dashboards to predictive analytics (see Jargon buster). Big data is now at the peak of Gartner’s hype cycle for emerging technologies. The hype cycle illustrates the stage of maturity in the adoption of new

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Jargon buster Recent technology developments are transforming the way leading companies manage and analyse their data.

Management accountants should be familiar with the following terms in particular:

technologies. The pattern is for initial excitement about a new innovation to inflate expectations above its true potential, before a period of disillusionment when expectations aren’t met. Later, typically over a five to 10 year period, the technology’s real potential becomes clear as users achieve tangible benefits.

This suggests big data technology may be entering a period of disillusionment before its true value is fully understood.

Advances in technology, along with simpler and cheaper analytics and data visualisation tools, are opening up data opportunities for firms of all sizes. But, for most businesses, adapting to a data-driven business environment remains a work in progress. One report suggests that one in four companies has yet to tap most of their organisational data, while another 53% estimate they use only half of their valuable data.

Growing attention is being paid to new analytics techniques and tools, aimed at drawing new insights from data. However, few companies have the range of complementary skills required to translate these analytical insights into true commercial impact.

This is where management accountants hold a clear opportunity to deliver value. The advanced analytical techniques necessary to mine data, identify new correlations and developalgorithms to predict behaviours are in the domain of data scientists. But management accountants’ roles in producing financial accounts, and in the processes of budgeting, forecasting and performance management, put them in contact with every aspect of a business.

Contributing such information provides management accountants with an excellent overview of the business. They can therefore play an important role in ensuring that the analytical insights gained.

Data analytics Data analytics refers to advanced forms of analysis that can be used to explore large volumes of data and communicate insights. These can be used to identify correlations and develop algorithms to predict behaviours.

Data analytics with regard to structured or enterprise data is well established.

It is used by many companies and organisations to help make better business decisions, and to test and validate models or theories. There are now high expectations of data analytics with regard to new forms of unstructured data.

Cloud computing Cloud computing refers to the provision of various services, such as software applications, development platforms, servers, processing power and storage, via remote servers over the internet, as opposed to on a local server.

Typically referred to as the ‘cloud’, it often entails users paying for IT services as needed, while the back-end application or infrastructure is managed by a third party vendor.

Dashboards A data dashboard is a user interface that organises and presents corporate information in a way that is easy to read and interpret. It can be used to aggregate a range of data and KPIs, often visually, for managers to monitor business performance.

Data mining A set of techniques used to sift through very large amounts of data. Data mining uses artificial intelligence techniques and advanced statistical tools (such as cluster analysis and regressions) to reveal trends, patterns and relationships.

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Data scientist A data scientist is someone who performs statistical analysis and data mining on large volumes of data, typically to identify trends, figures and other relevant information.

Makes use of advanced modelling, statistics, analytics and mathematics techniques.

Data visualisation Data visualisation is a general term used to describe technology that enables business managers to see trends and data patterns. These tools often go beyond the standard charts and graphs used in Excel spreadsheets, using more intuitive dials and gauges, geographic maps, time-series charts, heat maps and so on. Patterns, trends and correlations that may otherwise be missed can be spotted more easily with data visualisation software.

Hadoop Hadoop is a Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. It is available as open source software from Apache, and is commonly used to handle huge data volumes, spanning thousands of servers.

In-memory processing In-memory processing enables businesses to analyse large data sets significantly faster than before, by allowing data to be processed in the system’s memory instead of the slower, traditional processing taking place in the hard drive.

‘Internet of things’ The ‘internet of things’ describes the connecting of everyday physical objects to the internet, allowing them to provide information or alerts as a node on the network. This provides organisations with a vast new source of information on every aspect of their business, by connecting and monitoring machinery, vehicles, equipment, stock items and much more.

MapReduce MapReduce is a software framework that allows developers to write programmes that process massive

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amounts of unstructured data in parallel across a distributed cluster of processors or stand-alone computers.

Metadata Metadata is data that describes other data. It provides a valuable reference to help organise and locate particular types of data. Examples of metadata on a simple document would include metadata on the date the document was created, date modified and file. Metadata is also used for images, videos, spreadsheets and web pages.

OLAP Short for online analytical processing, a category of software tools that provides analysis of data stored in a database. OLAP tools enable users to analyse different dimensions of multidimensional data. For example, it provides time series and trend analysis views.

Predictive analytics Predictive analytics is the branch of data mining concerned with forecasting probabilities. It uses variables that can be measured to predict the future behaviour of a person or other entity. Predictive analytics leverages an organisation’s business knowledge by applying sophisticated analysis techniques to enterprise data. In business, predictive analytics are often used to answer questions about customer behaviour and offer suggestions on how best to target resources for maximum return.

Social media Social media is the umbrella term for software tools and platforms that allow groups to generate content and engage in peer-to-peer conversations. Facebook and Twitter are merely the two most high profile examples of such platforms.

Unstructured data The term ‘unstructured data’ refers to any data that has no pre-defined structure, and thus cannot be easily stored within standard relational databases. Examples include email, text-based documents, images, videos and callcentre recordings.