Before we begin a detailed reading of this article, which explains the concept of ‘linking data with its business’, let’s dive in and get some of the basic concepts clarified.
What is data?
Although there is no specific definition, a generic one could be:
“Any information that can be processed through a specific source, from which inferences may be drawn and utilized as a baseline for individuals or organizations.”
This information or data can be in form of numbers from logbooks, graphical information on a manual, any observations or specifications inscribed in a journal, measurements or ingredients labeled on a product, on a physical document or located digitally, and so on.
Why do we need data?
We use data to generate inferences for both personal and business decisions so that one can strategize and leverage data for improved organizational outcomes.
Usually, organizations, regardless of their size & service type, try to widen their business impact through data. It’s a crucial driving factor for their business strategy.
It can be a big factor for a large organization to increase their customer acquisition or help in their retention. It can also be used by a small firm to improve their marketing insights or help with their targeted advertising.
It can be used to eliminate risks, capture revenue, address costs, locate any bottlenecks, and help perform checks on potential roadblocks so that the business can deliver greater value and to higher scale.
Who consumes data the most?
Data can be utilized by anyone and everyone. In our case, it’s consumed largely by data-driven entities. These entities are individual or organizations that make their strategic decisions based on the information processed from their premises. They rely more on the data generated from their source systems to help them improve their organization’s growth.
It is essential for any data-driven entity to have a good data strategy in place. This will help them to strengthen their business. A good strategy backed by up-to-date systems at the organization’s disposal will help in speedy decision making and provide the ability to enhance faster and provide a more competitive edge to businesses.
Benefits of relating organizational data with its core business
Having resilient, scalable, and modern platforms in place helps link an organization’s data to its core business and achieve desired business outcomes.
Establishing a strong technology foundation that holds all the relevant information within an operating model and is governed by the right strategy and policies will help generate valuable and helpful insights. Analyzing the data in a specific format will help to understand why certain business decisions didn’t work earlier and help to improve and evaluate ongoing organizational strategies.
It’s an important investment for a growing business to start adopting or perform the basic necessary steps to become a ‘data-centric’ organizations to begin with. This can provide them with a more competitive advantage and lower the operational cost with numerous other factors that the organizations can leverage.
Typical Benefits:
Increase in growth:
Organizations can leverage and prepare strategies to help them increase their revenue, which is a measure to showcase the organization’s success.
With boosted revenue and an increase in profits, organizations can increase their service level performance, which will allow them to meet commitments by predicting the increase in customer demand.
Decrease in costs:
Using valuable insights, organizations can increase their efficiency by targeting those elements that contribute to unnecessary expenditures.
It will also help organizations focus inward and help improve their staffing level forecasts, which will ensure they maintain operational costs. This, in turn, will help them increase their profits.
Creating future strategies:
Having the right system in place; one that measures the metrics for an organization’s progress, goals, and objectives, will enable an organization to envision its future by assessing its current state and channelizing efforts toward emerging opportunities.
They can assess the effectiveness of their services and perform changes to ensure maximum results. This will help them to drive their engagement and prepare strategies to improve sales.
Competitive Advantage:
Insights from data can help organizations improve their services and/or their products, and be more profitable than their rivals.
This will guide their innovation efforts and upgrade their underlining business processes further increasing their efficiency.
Improved Insights:
Having a centralized system in place, i.e. consolidated organizational data, will ensure companies get more information from their data and will also provide them with insights that are specific and relevant to the objectives they have and the actions they take.
This will ensure companies make better decisions rather than depend on their instincts.
Increase customer loyalty and value:
Insights can help to track customers that show greater chances of generating repeat business. This will help ensure that an organization’s customers get good quality products or services on time consistently. And that a long-term relationship is maintained, which will help to maximize the customer’s business value to the organization.
Data Visualizations:
To inform or educate readers, showcasing data in a graphical format is a more efficient method. This data can be showcased in a form of a story or simply put in a tabular format for readers to browse.
Data visualization allows for a more efficient transfer of information, which helps make business more efficient. Using an effective business intelligence tool that offers data visualization capabilities is necessary for organizations looking to improve their efficiency and succeed in the future. The goal of showing data as visuals is to showcase information more clearly. Numerical data can be converted into lines, bars, and charts to visually communicate a quantitative message.
Effective visualization can help users analyze complex data when it is presented in an easy-to-comprehend format. It helps to convey ideas more effectively and communicate information more clearly.
Data Visualization
How Analytics can help your organization:
It is an established criterion that data is key to any business. The process of understanding how to connect them lies with taking necessary action and implementing a plan which will direct an organization towards a data-driven path.
This requires that certain strategy development and certain assessments need to be performed, which may require an external expert as well as investments in their data assets.
Several organizations have already initiated a trend that supports data-driven decisions to outperform their competitors by utilizing information from their data innovatively using ‘Data Analytics’.
Data Analytics
Analytics helps in organizing and examining data. Data is collected from one or many sources, then the analysis is performed to provide meaningful insights.
Below are some of the ways data analytics can help organizations:
Monitor and Assess Risks:
By having an analytics system in place business users can unify their ideas and develop shared goals to prepare KPIs, and alert rules that are utilized and consumed by the organization.
This will help business users monitor the organization’s complete business and perform periodic assessments. These risks can be monitored and assessed anywhere in the world and filtered for any region or service line via a data analytics system.
Effective Operations:
Every organization needs to understand which products or combination of products and services are more popular in a particular region or season. It is essential to have a system in place that showcases granular details of the organization’s operations.
Analytics can help showcase real-time operations of the business, which can help alert organizations in case of discrepancies in operations. It can help plan, organize and streamline operations responsible for the production of goods and services.
Improved business decision-making:
It is necessary to anticipate market shifts and manage risks. It is also necessary to have a faster and fact-based decision-making system, rather than going with the gut while maintaining any inventory or making changes to offerings.
Analytics uses statistical techniques to offer solutions to strategic business questions and helps to systemize decision-making. It also helps them gain intelligence on market conditions, target consumers more successfully, and optimize processes. It can help management with detailed insights to perform cost valuations and pricing segmentations.
Faster response to market trends:
Within data analytics tools, businesses can quickly identify any shift in trends. Organizations can create a marketing initiative by recognizing marketing opportunities that arise and responding to them appropriately. To improve margins, for instance, it is necessary for manufacturers to ensure they have the necessary inventory—but not too much of it—to reduce costly movements.
Collaborate:
Analytical system users can collaborate on their work and share their findings internally and externally with other users. Dashboard snapshots can be created and shared via emails or distributed in a pdf format.
Users can add a personal comment or initiate a conversation about a report in a dashboard with their colleagues. Some of these comments may be targeted at a specific colleague or a general comment.
Customer 360:
When businesses track and understand the behavior of their customers, they can deliver superior customer experiences. Customers now expect a better consumer experience at every point of engagement.
Customer 360-degree view can help businesses to:
- Check all customers’ accounts in a single glance
- Identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
- Customer satisfaction analysis
- Increase in profits by reducing lost revenue associated with billing errors
- Derive customer-centric strategies
