BA SIG was established to facilitate skills development, accelerate the building of a pool of infocomm professionals and encourage the sharing of ideas in the business analytics space.

The infocomm spotlight continues to shine on business analytics with the Singapore Computer Society (SCS), the largest local infocomm professional body with more than 27,000 members, introducing its Business Analytics Special Interest Group (BA SIG) on 13 March.

Speaking at the launch of BA SIG, SCS President Mr Chak Kong Soon noted that business analytics and business intelligence are being rated as number one priorities in corporate IT today. Companies are investing in software platforms to answer three critical performance questions: How are we doing? Why? What should we be doing?

“With the growing relevance of big data and advanced analytics in businesses, Singapore is poised to be the business analytics competency centre for Asia,” he said.

However, the tremendous growth of opportunities in the business analytics space is also leading to a global shortage of skilled talents such as data scientists - business analytics professionals who have the ability to understand and process data, extract value and to visualise and communicate it.

In view of this, BA SIG was established to facilitate skills development, accelerate the building of a pool of infocomm professionals and encourage the sharing of ideas in this space.

In recent years, the need to build up a business analytics talent pool has taken on an added impetus as the volume of data, especially unstructured data, continues to expand at unprecedented rates.

“80 per cent of data created today is unstructured. It is not sitting in a database in an organised fashion. It is people tweeting, talking about topics in forums, emails, messages - data that is very random but very valuable because it is the unguarded truth from consumers,” said Mr Simon Thomas, Chairman of BA SIG.

Businesses realise that they have to find ways to tap on this information and make sense of it in order to unlock insights that can help them grow. To build up a talent pool that can help with this, BA SIG is seeking to drive awareness of the opportunities surrounding business analytics and to facilitate training and knowledge sharing.

For example, BA SIG is looking to offer programmes for skills development by tapping on its member companies and the educational institutions. It is also planning to host three or four BA forums this year and is working towards the creation of a business analytics certification programme. In addition, it will also leverage on SCS’ Infopier, Singapore’s first infocomm online registry for infocomm professionals, to highlight opportunities in the business analytics space.

And the opportunities promise to be exciting, said Mr Thomas. He believes that the next technology or the next paradigm for making sense of all this data is yet to be discovered, because the way the data is being handled today is not dramatically different from how it was done over the past 20 years with the use of relational database management systems. “It will be exciting to see how we create new tools and find new ways to resolve these problems,” he said.