FEATURE: BUSINESS ANALYTICS
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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
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