Getting data to work for you

As the saying goes, ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’. This idiom rings true of the modern digital landscape, where businesses have vast quantities of data available but all too rarely take full advantage of it. In fact, research firm Gartner predicted in 2009 that more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies would regularly fail to make insightful decisions from their data.

The big data revolution and the wealth of software solutions on the market add extra layers of complexity to businesses hoping to build a data driven culture. However, senior information and analytics managers must take the correct steps to navigate these complexities and prepare for the data challenges of tomorrow.

Insight to outcomes

To get the most out of an analytics strategy, CIOs should first plan how they are going to transform data into insight, then into outcomes. This may require going beyond the standard data sets and exploring some of the unstructured data that analytics software has collated. The benefits of tapping into the large volumes of unstructured data such as photos, videos and audio clips cannot be understated.

Other factors are also important, such as determining access speeds to certain data sets to ensure that data still has value when analysed. The ‘best-before’ date on data is constantly shortening thanks to the constant stream of new data being generated across the world. This means that business leaders need to understand what data sets are vulnerable to this shortened shelf life and take the appropriate measures to get timely or real time access to this data.

It’s not uncommon to see organisations deploy analytics strategies only to be disappointed with the results they achieve. Putting in the groundwork to plan the scope of an analytics project properly will go a long way to managing expectations and ensuring that KPIs and targets are realistic.

Strategic alignment

Once realistic expectations have been set, CIOs must then assess the effectiveness of their IT infrastructure. For example, if a business is using a legacy IT system, there is a high likelihood that it will be unable to cope with the intensive process of receiving, storing and accessing accumulated data.

However, ensuring that IT infrastructure capabilities align with the targets of the overall analytics strategy is only one part of the process. For any digital strategy to be successful, it is critical that staff have the correct mentality and approach to the project. This can be easily instilled by finding an effective means of engaging them with the data analysis process, which has traditionally proved challenging due to the need for specialist technical skill sets.

This can be easily addressed. Providing staff with a self-service solution that is both easy to use and intuitive alleviates pressure on the IT department and helps the business avoid expensive consultancy days. Staff can subsequently adopt a more digital mindset by being more actively engaged in drawing actionable insight from data sets.

Finally, and most importantly, strong leadership from the decision makers responsible for pushing the organisation forward is needed to convert the insight garnered from analysis into deliverable action. Only once these steps have been taken can businesses drink deep from the well of data.