Currently, there are 4.66 billion internet users in the world and approximately 40 trillion gigabytes of data available to be understood. The vast amount of data available means that data analytics for decision-making are of fundamental importance to your IT organization.
With the growth of IT and the ongoing transition to digital services, there are now more connected devices than ever before.
Organizations that take advantage of data-driven decision-making are positioned to remain competitive into the future, as those that do not leverage data to steer their organizations risk becoming irrelevant.
Companies are using data to make decisions and inform future strategies to give themselves a huge competitive advantage. According to recent studies, by 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will view information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency as the rise of data-driven decision-making is becoming more and more prominent.
To gain a competitive advantage using data to make decisions, the focus should be on utilizing and generating value from the data to gain insights that can be used to improve your IT operations and the way you deliver services.
The approach should not be to just gather as much data as possible but to thoughtfully design your data collection and analysis practices.
Data analytics for decision making is now playing a key role in helping organizations drive operational excellence, so it is important to truly understand your data in order to help identify cost-cutting opportunities, establish more efficient operational processes, and to better understand your customers and deliver them exceptional value.
Enhanced Insights
Data-driven decision-making is built upon a foundation of enhanced insights. Ensuring that your data is readily available is the first step to using data to make decisions. When data is made readily available to your entire organization and is collected from your customers by automated systems, then huge amounts of information can become actionable intelligence.
Scaling this capability across an organization can significantly improve productivity and streamline operations for enhanced services. Organizations that gain insights from the data they collect will be the ones to uncover new opportunities and areas for improvement as they utilize data analytics for decision-making purposes.
Uniting Business Practices
Recent advancements in business technology have led to rapid changes to the traditional operational oversight processes. Smart, data-driven companies are now taking advantage of these advancements to connect the dots across the business and help manage operations in real-time as they are now regularly using data to make decisions quickly.
When analytics is combined with automation, organizations can connect workflows and automate tasks across the business, streamlining complex operations, and program management processes easily. This full-scale approach to automation also helps drive greater standardization and ensures better consistency and quality across all programs and processes.
Visible Metrics
Metrics and performance benchmarking are key aspects of operational excellence as well as improving your data-driven decision-making over time. Organizations need to measure and track performance consistently to grow their business more sustainably.
When a modern analytics solution is connected to backend systems, teams can receive real-time visibility across operations without having to log into multiple systems repeatedly.
Interactive dashboards and automated reports simplify tracking performance KPIs, projects, and programs. These capabilities enable users to get instant access to the underlying data, acquire further insight, and effectively use data analytics for decision making.
When organizations have complete visibility into where they are regarding revenue, profit, compliance, deadlines, and more, they will see significant improvement in their operations at a reduced risk.
Better Value
To increase the value for customers, it is vital to understand what their specific needs are, their desired quality, and their price range. Modern data analytics solutions provide key insights into markets, products, services, competitors, and customer segments to help inform decision-making.
Capturing a wide variety of data will help organizations better understand the true Voice of their Customers (VoC) in multiple ways, providing data into how to improve the overall customer experience and create new opportunities for future sales.
When this information is made available to teams across the organization, it creates a culture focused on delivering better value-based upon using data to make decisions.
Futureproofing
New and emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and natural language processing are greatly impacting data analysis. Many of these technologies pull meaning from data sets and can automate various types of processes and decisions throughout the process.
Modern analytics that incorporates these new technologies enable organizations to rapidly gain key insights, improve overall visibility, and adapt to the constantly evolving business needs.
Using data to make decisions in collaboration with these new technologies helps organizations instill a forward-looking approach to their business that is based on trend analysis, pattern identification, and customer analytics.
Final Thoughts
The level of data being collected is increasing daily. Most organizations are collecting a lot of data but are still struggling to use it effectively to gain a clear competitive advantage.
It will be the organizations that understand these trends in data analytics who will be able to use them to increase the value they deliver to customers as a result of their data-driven decision-making.
This is a moment of opportunity to develop an effective analytics strategy so you can become a true leader in your industry and stay there for years to come.
