Analytics as part of business strategy

In the current business environment, no business decision can be made and executed if it is not supported by data. Almost all company decisions are backed by hard numbers. In the past, recommendations from industry experts were often enough to make strategic decisions; nowadays, recommendations even from veteran experts cannot hold ground if they are not supported by cold numbers.

Data — this is what defines the present business arena. Those who know how to use it will have the strategic advantage in dominating the market and edging out their competitors.

Data analytics offers promising benefits. Specific uses include forecasting sales, predicting customer churn and detecting fraud. Solving these problems increases profitability and reduces operational costs. Through data analytics you can also discover behavioural patterns of consumers.

With this, current products can be improved to better meet customers’ needs, and in some cases these consumer insights lead to new products. But adopting analytics as part of an organisation’s business strategy can be challenging. Sometimes organisational restructuring is needed, which is not easy to execute. IT infrastructure investment is also needed to meet future demand for data storage and computing resources. These are some of the challenges companies face in transforming into intelligent, adaptable enterprises.

Analytics roadmap

For businesses to successfully transform into data-driven enterprises, crafting an analytics roadmap is necessary. A plan of action that outlines goals and strategies, and how analytics is embedded in each area and phase, gives a clear picture of the direction of execution. Enterprise analytics transformation plans are mostly long-term — it can take a couple of years to reach a data maturity level where the company and its employees are properly maximising the value of data.

Analytics team

Building an analytics team is crucial. A good analytics team is usually composed of data scientists, data engineers and data visualisation developers. The team handles critical analytics and data projects across departments — sales, operations, marketing, human resources and any other department with available data — so collaboration across departments is necessary for success.

Successfully integrating analytics into business strategies, goals, plans and company culture is not an easy task. It takes effort and investment. Most importantly, company leaders and executives must rally behind analytics initiatives for them to have continuity and be successfully adopted across the enterprise.