INNOVATION
Data Is The New Oil: Are
Your Business Processes
Truly Data Driven?
By Eugene Wanekeya
A
s a business operating in this
highly competitive 21st century
marketplace, you don’t have a
justifiable excuse for not running data
driven business processes. Whether it’s
your HR, Production, Supply Chain, Sales
and Marketing and so on, data driven
insights give your business pinpoint
accuracy in decision making which has a
direct positive impact on your bottom line.
Whereas many professionals do believe
that being data driven is a no brainer
and should be a part of their day to day
decision making, in most cases, they have
it all wrong on what it truly means to be
data driven.
What do I mean by this? Let’s take sales
and marketing as a case study. Many
businesses dedicate plenty of resources
in the collection of consumer data. This
has especially been made easy thanks
to technology which has done well to
complement and even replace old school
methods of data collection. There are
various tools available, both free and paid
for that will enable a marketer gather very
valuable consumer data.
profitable activity; so must data be broken
down, analyzed for it to have value.”
To put this into context, let’s take the
marketer who has collected insights using a
tool like Google Analytics, on the number
of website visitors, what they clicked on,
what products they spent most of their
time on, how often they viewed certain
sections of the website, sources of website
traffic, the demographic information of
website visitors and the devices that were
used to access the website, among others.
This is great wealth in terms of consumer
data. But, what do you do with all this
data? This is where most of the battles to
be data driven are won or lost.
You may genuinely have the desire to run
data driven business processes but fail at
putting in place the right infrastructure to
enable you to do so. The right infrastructure
involves having a team that can effectively
analyze and make sense out of the data
you collect, and give you clarity on how
you can make use of the insights from this
data to develop strategies that will drive
business value and generate more profits.
However, this is just a tip of the
iceberg. Being data driven in business is
predominantly about making sense out
of the data you are collecting and turning
this insights into profits. This is where data analytics comes into
play. The beauty about data analysis is that
technology will help you with most of the
legwork consequently, what you are left
with is making sense out of the insights
the data generates.
Clive Humby got it spot on when he said,
“Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if
unrefined it cannot really be used. It has
to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals,
etc. to create a valuable entity that drives Therefore, as an assignment for you, or
rather as a reward from me to you for
keeping up with me through this article,
I will share with you two valuable tips.
Read up on Business Intelligence (BI) and
14
MAL31/19 ISSUE
Big Data. I don’t want to turn this into
a technical piece so I will summarize by
mentioning that both these fields deal with
collecting and processing large chunks of
data with the purpose of delivering added
value to the organization.
Just to summarize this article, the value of
converting data into actionable insights
in today’s highly competitive business
landscape can’t be overstated. Regardless
of the industry or profession, the ability to
collect and correctly interpret data, and use
the resulting insights to enhance business
value, is directly linked to profitability. You
may have the greatest team running your
business, but they are not miracle workers.
Every decision that they make must be
driven by the right insights.
Therefore, ensuring that your business
processes are data driven will completely
change the way you do business as your
team will be freed from the burden of
theories, guesswork and intuition, to more
knowledge based decision making.
Eugene Wanekeya is the Head
of PR and Communications at
ATLANCIS Technologies, an
Innovative IT Solutions provider
transforming the ICT landscape in
Africa. To interact with and get to
know more about this trend spotter,
you can reach him via mail at:
[email protected]