Lufthansa, Europe’s second-largest airline, had over 500 subsidiary companies. And till a few years ago, their massive amounts of unstructured data would always end up becoming data waste as no actionable insights were derived from them. As a result, the company invested in a data analytics platform and encouraged data culture across their subsidiaries. The decision-makers also began to make informed decisions based on the acquired data insights. As a result, their overall efficiency shot up by 20 per cent.
Ninety per cent of the world’s data was produced in the last two years alone. With the world being overrun by data, the role of data technology and data analytics is becoming multifold. No doubt, data will exponentially become one of the greatest powers a business can hold, and it will intersect with people, technologies, and business processes for enhanced revenue growth and customer experience. But the most important question to be considered is: Does data deserve a seat on the table?
A recent IBM report revealed that 59 per cent of companies have undergone the digital transformation. Companies that made data-driven decisions such as advanced technological investments and hiring data analysts even before the pandemic have seen greater growth and value as compared to the others who had a drastic impact due to the recession.
The shift is not a temporary trend accelerated by the pandemic but a permanent business industry shift. The core component that makes the full transformation possible is data, which is treated as a strategic enterprise asset. In 2020, McKinsey reported that high-performing companies are three times more likely to state that their data and analytics reports have contributed to at least 20 per cent of their EBIT.
Data has significantly evolved in the last decade, and there was a time when companies invested in data warehouses. Soon, they began to migrate to data lakes leaving data warehouses as a cornerstone. Today, data is an in-house asset with several use cases orchestrating a hybrid cloud environment and being a key player across verticals.
Also Read: Data-driven Marketing is Critical for Brands
Exploring Data Significance in Various Verticals
Marketing
In a world driven by eCommerce and hybrid shopping, marketing teams are expected to be creative, insightful, and result-oriented. Most marketers find data infusion into every division of marketing to be necessary. Marketing data, including digital media, spend, website performance, and actionable insights into customer journeys, are some of the benefits of data-driven marketing.
Sales
There was a time when driving sales was an intuition-driven process. A company would try to understand its audience and create sales strategies accordingly. However, in recent times, sales data metrics replaced intuition as the critical element. Data and analytics can help the sales team with actionable insights into the process, identify strong leads, and help prioritise resources.
Supply Chain
Predicting the future demand of a product or service is essential to maintain a steady inventory flow without causing an inventory drought or an overflow. With customer data insights, supply chain business decisions can successfully enhance brand valuation and customer loyalty. During the pandemic, many businesses realised the need for data insights in supply chain strategies to manage their plummeting business. Today, companies can also use data insights to identify customer trends and build effective business plans.
Finance
Financial fraud analytics, real-time analytics, consumer analytics, and risk analytics are some of the use cases data in the finance department. Financial business solutions driven by data analytics offer more promise than spreadsheets with unprocessed data. Strong financial data insights fuelling business decisions or strategies can dramatically improve an organisation’s growth.
Also Read: Can Data Analytics Give Your Business A Competitive Edge?
Human Resources
Data insights from online assessment tests, application-based management profiling, and virtual interviews can help the HR department make better decisions for the hiring process, employee experience, and work culture as well. HR analytics can efficiently improve the workload, increase the speed of addressing grievances, and allow HR to focus on creating better data-driven solutions for the company.
Data insights from all the verticals must take centre stage in the boardroom. When companies need to modify a certain aspect of the business infrastructure, data from all the necessary verticals can play a huge role in making the right decision. It’s high time that intuition-based decision making is put in the closet and backing strategic decisions with actionable data takes the seat at every boardroom table.
In several companies, data assets justify its market value and many companies have started to represent data at the C-level. This organisational redesign is critical for businesses that want a better revenue model, lower compliance and litigation goal, reduced expenses, and higher returns on information assets. Without data analytics, insights, appropriate decisions, and even cybersecurity are far-fetching goals.
A recent IDC research indicated that 83 per cent of CEOs want their company to be more data-driven, but there is a considerable gap between the desire to use data and how it is actually used within the company. The research revealed that for every ten largely data-driven organisations, 23 are struggling.
There are a multitude of tools such as The ADEX, KNIME, and MonkeyLearn to help brands collect, prepare, analyse, and visualise their unstructured data and provide actionable insights.
Businesses worldwide understand that without data, they risk losing customers and allow competitors to leave them far behind. Five years ago, a company dipping feet into data was considered to be a modern enterprise with leading-edge technology. Today, data-driven strategies are all-important to stay ahead in the race.
In a data-driven company, you see accurate and relevant data playing a vital role in creating strategies, building business plans, and being an important managerial asset. A deeper insight will reveal new possibilities of innovation, experimentation, and exploration, and also that some failures are okay. After all, it’s a new and exciting turn of business history ruled by data.
