Manage yourselves better: Personal Analytics comes to the fore.
What is Personal Analytics?
Like business analytics is for businesses and enterprises, personal analytics is for individuals. It is an intriguing and novel kind of analytics which harnesses and analyzes vast amounts of personal data to provide valuable and actionable insights. Personal data includes human health, tastes and preferences, areas of interests, mobility, daily chores, social media activities, personal finance, biometrics, behaviors, emotional states and much more.
Analyst firm Gartner has added Personal Analytics amongst sixteen new technologies, to its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2016. According to Gartner, Personal Analytics will take 5–10 years for mainstream adoption.
Why is it important?
A movement called Quantified Self is already in place, which aims to measure varied aspects of person’s daily life like health, emotional states; moods etc. for self-knowledge and self-tracking. This can serve as one of the crucial data sources for personal analytics.
Personal analytics will empower humans to learn about themselves. It has incredible potential to improve the quality of one’s lives through self-sensing, self-awareness and self-advancement. It will be descriptive, diagnostic, predictive as well as prescriptive. Personal analytics will aid better decision making to attain a gamut of objectives in individual’s personal and professional lives, and will also provide an enhanced user experience.
As Steve Lohr expresses in his book on Data-ism, a new phase will usher where Internet-scale data sets will be used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. This will transform decision making, leadership and management. Personal analytics will be a vital element of this phase.
Below image highlights the opportunity for personal analytics to capture insights from varying aspects like health and well being, employment data, social media activity and much more to project a comprehensive and more meaningful 360 degree view.
Key Enablers
Sourcing, synthesizing and making valuable sense of vast amounts of personal data and providing actionable insights are the underpinning of Personal Analytics. The nexus of forces, that is, convergence of cloud, social, mobile and information will be the key enablers.
Number of connected things is expected to soar, with certain sources of personal analytics such as health wearables already becoming widespread and popular. There is great potential for wearable devices to unlock new consumer data like attitudes, emotions, habits, motives and patterns. Smart agents and artificial intelligence driven virtual personal assistants for the consumers are another big source of data for personal analytics like daily schedules, mobility, tastes and preferences, personal finance etc. Gamification is another self-tracking and self-surveillance technique which lends itself to personal analytics applications.
Some cases in point
In addition to having a well-crafted digital strategy, user experience is becoming strong focus for organizations with aspects like security and privacy gaining importance.
Employers are disseminating activity trackers like FitBit to motivate their employees to adopt healthier and more productive lifestyles, and also to bring down organizational insurance costs. Similarly enterprises are incorporating people/ employee analytics to enhance overall productivity, provide a faster feedback loop and guide people management.
Another example is Disney’s MagicBands which track users through Disney theme parks to get a more comprehensive view of customers and deliver personalized and targeted experience. Also, many players in BFSI domain like Capital One, WealthFront, and Personal Capital etc. are offering virtual digital assistants for managing customers’ smart wallets, providing financial planning advisory services and online and mobile banking assistance to their customers. Personal analytics is also being applied in education institutions to improve quality of education and ensure student success.
So what?
Personal data is characterized by unpredictability, high volume, variety and velocity. The worth of Personal Analytics will be commensurate with the quality of data and power of analytics done over it. Besides, nexus of forces resulting in involvement of multitude of parties necessitates robust information governance mechanisms and establishing trust of consumers.
Personal analytics will benefit consumers by sharing valuable insights about them and promoting healthier and more fruitful lifestyle, raising standards of living and at the same time providing a rich user experience with fun. It could also be useful for an individual to master one’s capabilities and enable self-improvement, both on personal and professional fronts.
Businesses can get a more granular view of their customers and can benefit by leveraging consumer data for product personalization, customized targeting and marketing, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, product innovation, achieving operational efficiencies and strengthening customer relationship.
New personal analytics vendors and solutions are expected to emerge and disrupt present-day analytics markets. Personal analytics will open up avenues for businesses to innovate new interconnections and business models across industries. However, ensuring customer buy-in and trust will be vital for success of organizations leveraging personal analytics.
