It was a winter morning over two decades ago. My class mates and I had braved the cold to turn up at the IIT Kanpur airfield to carry out experiments required to complete our course. The excitement was palpable because most of us were going to fly for the first time.

"... You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because, in either game - life or football - the margin for error is so small. ...The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch.  …cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the **** difference between WINNING and LOSING, between LIVING and DYING. … "   -  Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday

Since the advent of BI, organizations of all sizes have pushed to broaden their spectrum of analytical insights.  Of course, a key motivator for this effort was to improve operational efficiency. In many organizations, these efforts did not deliver to the management’s expectation. The root causes for the failure in most cases are information latency and lack of cross-functional linkage.

For most of us words like big data, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and real-time analytics conjure up images of innovative companies and new business models.  Whether it is Uber matching taxis to riders, eBay helping sellers set optimal initial bids, NYPD determining gunshot locations, NEST reducing energy use, or airlines applying dynamic pricing, the common denominator is collection and analysis of data in real-time. Though consumer facing applications have got more attention, the impact on intra/cross-enterprise processes has been just as remarkable – examples include Tesco managing shelf inventory based on weather, and Global Brands Group using demand info to prioritize containers to onshore.