What is data's worth if it does not drive strategies?

Data, Analytics, and Insights, three powerful words thrown around to drive business strategies make growth targets possible with leverage-able data to wield customer success stories – but only if enterprises know how to use it!

Going by the latest adage, data being the new oil, many businesses use this data to support their decisions, in short, this data moves business! Have you ever wondered why is data so indispensable? After all, data is not only numbers, texts, or observations, which can translate into actionable insights after figuring out what the decision-makers want from their data.

Data, analytics, and insights are intertwined together to deliver a deep understanding of your enterprise goals and customer base. If data is the input point, Analytics makes sense of that data and Insights provides essential wisdom about the realities of your enterprise, pin-pointing to actions you can take to better your strategies.

It is true that businesses still struggle to make data-driven business decisions, and instead trust the tried and tested methods, experience, status quo, and "gut feeling" how to set strategies into the course of action. However, with complex business operations spanning geographies, accurate insights cannot be obtained without extensive analytics, and analytics is lifeless without data.

Thus, in a crux, an organization's strategy pyramid should encapsulate the following-

Step 1. Solving the Data Maze

Step 2. Uncovering Analytical Trends

Step 3. Driving Strategy with actionable Insights

Solving the Data Maze

When we think of data, the catching phrases of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tend to immediately spring up. But what happens behind the scenes is an extensive amount of handwork that goes to bring this data to life. Data makes up the base of the strategy pyramid. Think of data as an unprocessed intelligent insight, raw numbers captured or generated across business domains. For example, the inventory logs, customer transactional data pulled into an excel spreadsheet as a data dump.

To effectively analyze and utilize this data dump, the quality of data is as important as its quantity. Originating from quantitative (numbers or text) and qualitative (sentiment data, data collected from observations), organizations need the right structural foundations in place to build dependable analytical trends. To start with, you will need a data expert's help to start collecting this raw and unprocessed data and determine which data goes for analysis.

Uncovering Analytical Trends

Data is more or less meaningless without Analytics!

Analytics being the second stepping stone of the strategy pyramid defines how you make sense of the data collected in step 1, to uncover meaningful trends. Tremendous value is buried in these massive data sets, which is tough to unlock without the help of analytics.

Take for instance, for a mobile app, your data might tell you sent 50,000 push messages last month to your customers. This is just a number, without meaning, but an analytics tool spins the magic and reveals actionable information, like 3.7 messages were sent per user, about 20% of those were opened and accessed. This is how data starts talking!

Data analytics is impossible without data analysts and data scientists. They are the brains who employ a range of quantitative and qualitative modeling methodology, research approaches, and pragmatic machine learning algorithms to instil life into data.

Driving Strategy with actionable Insights

The tip of the pyramid, Data, and analytics are worthy only if they can bring valuable insights. It is just like an abstract painting with intelligent interpretations. Having someone within your organization who can translate this talking data in a language the business understands is crucial. Imagine getting lost in an unknown land without a google translator!

"Powerful data insights can challenge the on-going status quo of an Enterprise"

Businesses across vertices are seeking to make sense of the data they collect from multimedia, wearable devices, mobiles, social media, sensors, GPS, machine logs, to develop actionable insights. Insights, therefore, is of strategic importance. Helping enterprises to assess the dynamic business environment and set up their course of future trends. Whether it is the best time to introduce a new product to the market, identify the most likely sales funnel your potential customers will fall or suggesting the best strategy for change management.

The insights gained through data mining and analytics processing are incredibly powerful, as they create meaningful engagement opportunities and point to the direction in which you can grow your business to prominence.