This thought leadership article is brought to you by SayOne Technologies providing tailored data analytics applications for customers around the world.
Many organizations are affected by the rapid changes in our society due to new technologies. The rate of change that organizations experience has increased to such an extent that half of S&P 500 companies are expected to be replaced by newcomers in the next 10 years. These newcomers use emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 3D printing or the Internet of Things. In addition, most of the new organizations take a different form than traditional organizations; many new organizations, or startups, are decentralized platform organizations that have been around for less than a decade but have experienced exponential growth.
Examples of these newcomers are Uber, which is the worlds largest taxi company that does not own any taxis; AirBnB, the worlds largest accommodation provider that does not own any hotels; WhatsApp, the worlds largest telecom company that does not own any telecom infrastructure or Alibaba, the second largest retailer that does not own any inventory. Each of these innovators disrupts an entire industry and they have two common denominators; they collect data in everything they do and they use algorithms to derive actions from that data. This data-driven approach completely changes the rules of the game. In order to deal with these changes, organizations have to understand how they too can become data-driven.
For many organizations, transforming the organization into a data-driven, analytics company is difficult. Big Data changes how organizations are managed, how organizations are designed, the culture and identity of an organization and changes how decisions are made. In addition to that, not the data collection is the challenge for organizations, but applying and deriving action from the data, i.e. the analytics of the data at hand. More and more organizations understand this and as such Big Data has now emerged as the corporate standard.
Not only newcomers such as Uber or AirBnB can take a data-driven approach. Big Data offers every organization tools such as predictive or prescriptive analytics to derive insights from the massive amounts of data collected. These insights enable organizations to better deal with the rapid changes in the environment and to ensure sustained competitive advantage, even when newcomers try to disrupt your business. So, how can your organizations become data-driven?
Three Steps Towards a Data-Driven Approach
For those organizations that have no experience with Big Data Analytics, it is important to understand that starting with Big Data does not have to be a painful and long process. In fact, thanks to new software tools such as Big-Data-as-a-Service, it has become relatively easy to get started. These solutions offer many advantages to organizations, including a pay-as-you-go price plan, which means that, especially at first, the costs can remain low. However, before you start with a Big-Data-as-a-Service solution, or any other Big Data project, ensure that you have a common understanding within the organizations what Big Data is and what analytics can do for your business. After all, Big Data Analytics means something different for every organizations and manager/employee.
Once you have a common understanding, and you have started with the first small Big Data projects using a Big-Data-as-a-Service solution, it is time to scale up. This can be done through two ways; first, start collecting data in everything that you do, i.e. start datafying your business. This means collecting data within every process within your business; HR data, financial data, social media data, sales data, customer data and even data from devices that you connect to the internet. Once you are growing the amount of data your analytics will become more meaningful, better and provide you with more insights. The second way to scale up is moving away from a Big-Data-as-a-Service solution, towards a custom-made analytics application, with or without the usage of open source tools. Companies such as SayOne Technologies can assist you in developing an analytics platform that is tailored to your needs. SayOne Technologies is a company that provides a data analytics service to clients; they help you transform your company by offering data-driven applications that are tailored for your product or service.
The third and final step towards a data-drive approach is to change your culture to a data-drive culture. A data-driven culture embraces the usage of data in everything you do. However, it also requires a power shift within your company. If you are used to having a very controlled top-down business, big data analytics might not work for you. Real-time analytics require employees to be empowered to make decisions when they have access to the data.
SayOne Technologies experienced this first-hand. When they moved towards a data-driven culture, they had to completely change the internal mindset, approach and technology. It was a total shift from what they had been doing and the major challenges to overcome were 1) ensuring that they had enough data at hand to start experimenting with and 2) educating the team about the possibilities of predictive analytics. SayOne Technologies approach was to involve their employees in collecting the data for internal learning purposes, because of course it is ethically and legally not correct to use client data to experiment with. Therefore, they asked all employees to collect, voluntarily, as much data of their lives as possible and use that to experiment with and build predictive models. This offered two advantages; 1) employees immediately became involved and that changed the culture and 2) they learned first-hand the possibilities of building predictive models. The experience gained in this experiment, is now being used to help their clients become data-driven.
Take Aways
Big Data is rapidly affecting all organizations around the globe and if you want to remain competitive in your market, you will have to move along. Becoming a data-driven organization is as simple as three steps:
- Gain a common understanding of Big Data and start small, ideally using a Big-Data-as-a-Service solution.
- Datafy your business and start collecting as much data as possible. Use that data to create a tailored analytics solution that fits your needs.
- Change your culture to a data-driven culture that empowers employees to make decisions using real-time data.
Once you have started with Big Data, and you are working on it for some time, you will notice that you too can derive insights from massive amounts of data. And that your business too can remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment. Dont wait too long and get started today!
