Data and insights at the speed of disruption

Bart de Langhe and Stefano Puntoni wrote in Leading with Decision Driven Data Analytics, - “the goal of data analytics is to turn unknowns in to knowns so that alternative courses of actions can be ranked more objectively”

Unlike the pandemic which may be “once-in-a-life” disruption, businesses face disruptions in their internal and external environments frequently. When any disrupting event happens be it natural disaster or tariff war or change of regulatory environment, it is essential that business leaders have insights regarding its impact across their businesses and partner ecosystems within hours and not in days or in weeks. They need to understand their options of possible corrective actions and strategies and their potential effects in mitigation of the event.

Disruptions in the business happen but what slows down the leaders to have the assessment of the impact and their options available immediately or within hours? in our opinion the three prominent impediments being -

1. Data Silos in an enterprise

2. Data unified for (pre)defined purpose

3. Limited tools and skills

Data silos happen in the enterprise when multiple teams store their data and more often same data in different systems. The silos also get created as the various departments and functions of the enterprise are served by different cloud applications and data get accumulated in different clouds.

Data silos are big hurdles for executives to get a unified view of the enterprise. To achieve end-to-end view, organizations unify the data but often the unified data serves the purpose of limited data insights and views. The struggle here being the time and precise definition of future requirements and business processes.

Any change in business process or business need of new insights from the available data or for that matter to leverage new data sets become a costly IT project in terms of money and time.

To leverage different data sets, organizations deploy data engineering and data management teams and tools. These teams address the challenges of volume, velocity and variety of data with various skills and an array of software and technologies. The finite capacity of skills and tools forces leaders and organizations to prioritize and optimize the data initiatives. This results in inertia to react to business disruptions where the data insights are required in a changed environment but without a lag to form the options and decisions. Traditional slow tools can lead to an incomplete, a bit static and inaccurate view of the business, limiting the ability of leaders to react to shifting priorities and shocks in the business environment.

Organizations today need the data infrastructure that provides answers to all possible questions that leaders at all level may have to help them taking informed decisions. The next-gen unified data platforms like Incorta help organizations to skip the time-consuming data engineering and data warehousing to leverage insights of the data. The teams leverage the plug and play capabilities of the platform to ingest new data sets as and when required without spawning costly IT projects. Leaders get the near real time analytics to understand the impact and create options while conversing with data.