General
4 Jan 2023
Data and analytics are crucial for businesses who are looking to make better decisions, operate more efficiently and build great employee and customer experiences.
Though this has been true for decades, and almost every company recognises this by now, there is still a lot of work to do and a lot of opportunity to capture.
The urgency to act is also increasing. Markets are always becoming more competitive, and as the competition deploys more sophisticated uses of data and AI, having a strong capability in this area will become increasingly important.
Our belief is that the opportunity lies in the following 3 areas:
Most organisations of any scale have a data and analytics capability by now, but they tend to stop once they have implemented the basics.
This level of maturity can be described as business intelligence, where we are aggregating data to understand key metrics, but aren't being particularly sophisticated or ambitious with the analytics that are deployed.
There is significant value in simply taking this further, deploying a complete set of interactive analytics that incorporate statistics and data science to really extract deep insights from our datasets.
Then there is the potential to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to build predictive analytics and intelligent models to support decision making throughout the business.
Todays data technology and the modern data stack is a very powerful platform to build upon. It is fully managed and provided as a SaaS service, it is infinitely scalable by virtue of being in the cloud, and it is paid for based on the exact amount of storage and processing consumed.
The tools, libraries and techniques for analysing and visualising the data on top of this platform are also evolving at an equally rapid rate, whilst becoming easier to use and more accessible.
In the past, large businesses had to make significant investments in infrastructure, tools and staff to build these advanced data capabilities, whilst it wasn't even an option available to smaller businesses.
Today, the same powerful capabilities are available to everyone at the click of a button. They require very little setup, and data teams can immediately become productive, analysing their own data for insights and creating business value in a very focussed way.
Many businesses just need take the first step and start using this technology.
Most businesses use data to report on the past. Their analytics are based on historic and delayed data, and are then served through staid dashboards to managers and executives who use it to make strategic decisions over long term time horizons.
It is possible to use data in a much more operational capacity, using real-time analytics to understand what is happening right now, then using it to intelligently guide employees on the ground towards their "next best action".
When a business has this capability, they can identify and react to opportunities immediately, and solve problems before they impact customers and before they ever become visible as a KPI on an executive dashboard.
We think this combination of levelling up the sophistication of your analytics, rapidly adopting modern cloud based tools and platforms, and moving from strategic to operational analytics is a huge leap forward, and one with a potentially significant business case.
