720475Giving Meaning to Big Data for Business Transformation: Automating Discovery of CausalityClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKThis project will facilitate improved business performance by enabling senior decision makers to explore and interact with a visual, connected model of their business that is populated jointly from domain knowledge and insights derived from sources of ‘big data’. The model will support continuing analysis and validation of the projected performance of future scenarios and will enable investigation of points of difference between the domain expert and the results of best available analysis techniques. The model will use visualisations and expressions that reflect the natural way in which collaborating decision makers think about and understand how their business works and will enable the assessment of changes in terms of predictive ‘what if…’ scenario analysis. The project will establish the use of big data techniques to inform; with much quicker feedback, the consequences of business transformation activities, delivering benefits in terms of greatly increased confidence in decision making and speed of value from business change. The innovation focus is on the: a) Adaptation of ‘big data’ analysis algorithms to identify and validate the critical concepts in a business landscape model, together with a contextual cause-and-effect discovery engine to map the results of statistical analysis against domain expert views of how a business, or proposed scenario, works; b) Provision of new visualisation and validation techniques to replace traditional business process representations with paradigms more natural and intuitive to the decision maker i.e. a native business perspective and not a tool/technology constrained perspective. This new technology will both speed and scale transformational decision making within organisations, informed by both top-down and bottom-up analysis of the options and projected outcomes available, helping avoid the well-documented and catastrophic failures in business change that act as a drag on economic development and progress.