How Data Analytics is Transcending Boundaries and Creating a Positive Impact on The Functioning of Organizations

How Data Analytics is Transcending Boundaries and Creating a Positive Impact on The Functioning of Organizations

Authored by Mr. Vishal Goyal, Head of Digital COE under LOS business unit Fujitsu Consulting India

Gartner defines Advanced Analytics as the autonomous or semi-autonomous examination of data or content using sophisticated techniques and tools, typically beyond those of traditional business intelligence (BI), to discover deeper insights, make predictions, or generate recommendations. Advanced analytic techniques include those such as data/text mining, machine learning, pattern matching, forecasting, visualization, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, network and cluster analysis, multivariate statistics, graph analysis, simulation, complex event processing, neural networks.”

Data-driven enterprises are becoming more successful now. These organizations capture and reinforce the value of their data by constantly surrounding it with context — describing where it is from, who has access, and how it is being and has been used.

These organizations implement strong analytics solutions to empower people by securely, safely giving their employees direct access to data, as well as providing interactive dashboards and colorful visualizations.

Last decade has seen the rise of new tools and techniques as well as new sources and forms of data that are changing the landscape for business planning and innovation.

According to Forrester Research, insights-driven business are growing at an average of more than 30% annually and are on track to earn $1.8 trillion by 2021. Similar research from other consulting firms highlights the emergence of firms that are dominating their sectors as well as creating new markets by generating actionable insights through data collection and analytics.

Below are some of the positive impacts data analytics has on functioning of organizations:

  • Better Decision Making: Evidence from global businesses such as Boeing and Maersk show that when employees have better access to data then new ideas will emerge and operating improvements made. This requires data to be made available to everyone in the organization who needs it as well as the tools to analyze it. When decisions are made based on data and facts, those are more readily accepted by everyone and have confidence of achieving right results.
  • The fundamental objective in collecting, analyzing, and deploying data is to make better decisions
  • Competitive Advantage: Organizations who have trained their employees to better manage and analyze the data flowing through their machines have reported to have edge over competitors that do not. Data culture needs to be built from top to bottom and everyone in the organization needs to have mind-set of data culture.
  • Motivated Employees and Better Talent Management: When employees see that from top to bottom, decisions are driven through data analytics, they feel motivated and connected. When they have access to information, they need on their tips through tools and dashboards and not having to wait for excel reports, they feel they are in right place. For the technically talented people, it becomes extremely important to see a culture, which promotes healthy usage of data for decision-making and makes data available to everyone at ease.
  • Measure what matters: Implementation of data analytics and advanced technologies like machine learning helps us look at data with different views. In addition, this allows us to understand what is driving the maximum business impact (revenue, cost, employee satisfaction etc.).

Consider an example to understand the huge impact data analytics can have.

Let us say your organization conducts customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys are being conducted by sending an email with a link to a portal where survey questions are hosted and customers are asked to rate your organization on each question on a scale of 1 to 10 and give text based comments against each question

Now imagine two different scenarios, which can happen:

  1. Organization A looks at each of these surveys in isolation and tries to address the problems reported by each customer through their delivery teams. They look at comments given by each customer one at a time, read them and interpret and take actions according to their understanding. They use excels and pdf files to share customer feedback with everyone else. This gets repeated every time a feedback is taken from customers
  1. Organization B pulls in all the survey results from all the customers into an analytics platform, consolidates the results by different categories, questions etc. It also does sentiment analysis on the text comments given by the customers across all the questions. It then has dashboards refreshed every month with the latest data and does trend analysis on scores received every month, quarter, and year to see if feedback has improved or has become bad. With proper role based access control, different set of employees get to see these dashboards online to take decisions
  1. Whom out of organization A or B do you think will get better and have happier customers?
  2. Which of the 2 organizations do you think has good understanding of the top 2-3 issues driving down the customer satisfaction score
  3. Which organization will easily understand its key strengths, which drives customer delight?

Obvious answer will be B. In addition, why? Organization B is drive through a data analytics culture, which allows it to drive outcomes faster and consistently

Organizations need variety of analytics talent to drive this positive impact. Below are some of these

  1. Business Leaders
  2. Delivery Managers
  3. Data Architects
  4. Data Scientists
  5. Visualization Analysts
  6. Analytics Translators

The idea of adding a new technology to your organisation stack may feel overwhelming. However, data analytics is the “New Normal”. Analytics gives you the power to use your own data to your advantage. With a better big picture, the ability to make smart business decisions through a do-it-yourself approach, and the opportunity to better your bottom line, the right analytics solution needs to be on your “must” list for 2019.

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