Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 18 | Page 42

FEATURE: BUSINESS ANALYTICS ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Business analytics approaches can drive successful business performance which is something enterprises are invariably striving to achieve. Rich Pugh, Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist, Mango Solutions, discusses the importance of thriving with data science and how it can bring about success for enterprises in today’s tech industry. D ata is like the new oil. This analogy was first drawn by The Economist and in some respects, it is true. Successful businesses today run on data and, like oil, data is near-useless unless it is refined and treated in the correct way. But refining is a difficult process and with many business executives overwhelmed by the ‘hugeness’ of modern data, it’s easy to regard plug-and- play business intelligence, AI or Machine Learning solutions as a one-stop data-to- value machine. The problem is that all too often, these tools aren’t able to deliver the value expected of them; even if the technology finds an important and relevant correlation, businesses are unsure how to act on the information effectively and understand the full context of the finding. Insight becomes an attention-grabbing statistic in a slide presentation, or potentially a one-off decision made based on a piece of information and then nothing further. It’s hard to quantify what the long-term value of this was, because the full context is missing. What does it take to be truly data-driven? A data-driven organisation values its data as a primary asset and constantly strives to turn data into operational acumen to drive better decision making. This is where data science comes in – or more specifically, a company-wide culture of data science. Rather than just a tool to turn data into insight, data science is a way of blending together technology, data and business awareness to extract value, not just information, from data. While 81% of senior executives interviewed for a recent EY and Nimbus Ninety report agreed that data should be at the heart of all decision making, just 31% had actually taken the step to restructure their organisation to achieve this. That leaves a huge majority of organisations who recognise the potential of data but have yet to find a way to embed a data-driven culture within their business. Start at the top So where do you start? Firstly, an organisation has to want to become data- driven from a business perspective. That means that the process towards this has to be taken from the top down. Without leadership alignment, it will be nearly impossible to instigate the culture shift required to truly become data-driven. This means that the first vital step is to ensure representation for data-driven initiatives, as well as broader education at the leadership level. How culture can enable firms to be successful in adopting a data-driven approach 42 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com