Real Time Predictive Models – Are They Possible?

A few months back I was making my way through the latest literature on "real time analytics" and "in stream analytics" and my blood pressure was rising. The cause was the developer-driven hyperbole that claimed that the creation of brand new insights using advanced analytics has become "real time". The issue then as now is the failure to differentiate between time-to-action and time-to-insight. Not infrequently the statements about'fast data' are accompanied by a diagram like this, which to me has a fatal flaw. The flaw, to my way of thinking, is that there are really two completely different tasks here with very different time frames.