From Coding to Decoding: A Consultant’s way to take informed business decisions

Well, as a Technology Consultant, we have always been coding, learning new technologies, keeping ourselves up-to-date with the ongoing trends in the world of technology and implementing the same in the products that we deliver to our clients.

Whether a client is looking to implement a new system, replace an existing one, or customize software for his organization's particular needs, we help them with the options, facilitate the implementation, and work to make sure everything is up and running with the new technology solution. The most crucial part of a technology consultant’s job is to choose the right technology-stack. We position our users over technology: create the best user-experience, see if the users work on desktops or tablets, find out which browsers will be used most often, consider speed, performance, security and take many other factors into consideration before designing a product. We also check the latest Technology Radar to get an idea of how future-proof technologies are and decide whether to adopt them or put them on hold.

It is good if we have something more to offer: to ourselves and to our clients.

We do not realize the magical power of data that we already have. Every conversation we have with our client, each financial transaction, the volume of communications we send out every minute, our current love affair with social media generates a lot of data. Data speaks a lot, only if we know how to decode that.

Virtually every aspect of a business is now open to data collection. We must know to collect quality data, organize them properly, and use the right tools to leverage the superpower of data. While the information, product, service, and goal is different for each business, it is important to take the same holistic data strategy approach for each problem in building out data science

solutions. Data management, advanced analytics, and data visualizations gives us opportunities to dig deep and to improve customer insights, build products faster, or spot fraud, allowing our business to transform and flourish. A consultant’s statistical knowledge should at a minimum allow them to distinguish between random variation and a trend that could have vital importance for a client’s business. It is useful for consultants to develop a solid knowledge base in both multi-variant regression and clustering which, put together, will enable them to identify both causal elements and segments within large datasets. Through living tools, data analytics equips consultants with the capacity to continue adding value to the projects, provide a richer insight into what is really going on and allow decisions to be targeted and fact based rather than directional and approximate. The ability to understand and communicate complex information to a deeper and broader range of stakeholders will be perhaps the important consulting skill going into the 2020s.

So in order to take informed decisions, it is high time for Consultants to deepen their data expertise and assess the future consulting landscape through the lens of data analytics.