The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced a five-year research collaboration with Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, to develop advanced analytics solutions.

The joint research is aimed at closing the gap between the advance of analytics technologies and their successful application in specific industry and government environments.

The Accenture and MIT Alliance in Business Analytics will be headed by Narendra Mulani, senior managing director, Accenture Analytics, and David Simchi-Levi, professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering systems at MIT.

Its two streams of collaboration cover the challenges of harnessing big data and new approaches to improve the science of decision-making. The alliance combines the management firm's industry and analytics expertise with MIT's scientific and technological leadership.
 
“Organizations recognize the need to develop analytics capabilities that turn data into actionable insights in order to attain a competitive edge and growth,” said

Commenting on the alliance, Mulani said Accenture's alliance with one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes will help its clients achieve better outcomes driven by their analytics efforts.

"The challenge comes in fine tuning and applying analytics technologies to very specific issues and our studies show that organizations are not currently satisfied with the return on their analytics investment," he stated.

A recent Accenture study of organizations in the US and the UK revealed that the adoption of analytics is growing and that, compared to a similar analysis conducted three years ago, the use of analytics as a primarily predictive tool has tripled.

However, only 22 per cent of the respondents said they were very satisfied with the business outcomes delivered by their analytics investments to date and only 39 per cent said that the data they generate is relevant to their business strategies.
 
“Through our collaboration with Accenture we believe we can make important progress in creating new knowledge and in tackling some of the many data challenges faced by organizations today,” said Simchi-Levi.

According to him, the research on big data will cover how organizations can exploit the insights available from the growing volume of external, unstructured data.

"MIT, Accenture and Accenture clients will explore innovative uses of various data types and develop practical applications of advanced analytics. The parties will also identify ways to combine disparate data sources such as geolocation data, social media data and payments data, to solve unique industry problems in innovative ways," he added.
 
The decision science research will explore differentiators of effective decision-making and identify factors critical for its successful execution.

Projects in this stream will help companies apply trends in visualization, mobility and collaboration to improve decision-based processes. They will also look into the role cognitive science plays in decision-making.
 
The key projects include Life event monitoring; behavior data integration and offers platform aand social media causal monitoring.-TradeArabia News Service