Part - 1: The Hidden Treasure – the needle is moving from Digital-First to Data-First

Ayman El-Safadi, Chief Digital Officer, October 2021

The world is becoming interlocked at a pace that none of us expected! As a result of the pandemic and other associated factors, we watched the entire world shift their lives to digital-everything. Commutes were swapped for video conference calls, online delivery reached new highs ever, going to the movies was replaced with direct-to-streaming preferences, and the list is endless..

This sudden shift has been created out of apparent necessity and it sparks a lasting and permanent shift in customer behavior and expectations that, in turn, created new digital urgency and priorities for all businesses at all levels.

The abrupt shift to digital-first is more than a transitory period that only affects a subset of organizations—it signals a deeper paradigm shift from customers' and businesses' perspectives. Organizations who really care about their customers and create new value must embrace a more than digital-first mindset and strategy.

A true digital-first mindset is beyond setting corporate's digital goals, metrics, and relies on their business to anticipate customers' digital expectations. This deep realization of customers requires real-time insights and data-driven agility that goes beyond the traditional measurement systems. Tracking website visitors, demographic data, Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, and baseline dashboard metrics are no longer sufficient as complete and holistic indicators of customer preferences and behaviors. Such centralized (static) customer analytics functions create bottlenecks and data silos and detach organizations creating a real customer experience from powerful customer insights.

Today, organizations are faced with digital customers, savvy, dynamic, and maneuvering. Organizations need new strategies, tactics, and tools that enable them to keep up the pace. With customers, today and tomorrow going all-in on digital, businesses must shift their focus from digital-first to data-first and make it their top priority to survive.

We live in an age where we have access to a great amount of data, and we need to leverage that data to drive customer insights hence business benefits. Leveraging the data (Data-first) is becoming the norm practice to create value for organizations and unlock wider societal benefits.

Analytics Make Great Digital Businesses

In this digital-first age, organizations need to unleash what’s working, isolate where to double down and split in blackjack, and determine where to place their bets in order to exceed customer experiences & outlooks and keep up the pace with the competition. With deeper insight into digital customers, growth opportunities thrive from simply increasing the number of customers to creating a highly engaged, highly motivated, highly valued customer base.

The rise of digital-first involved the rise of new, more pressing data liberation metrics. Successful organizations with digital-first strategies in place mandate democratize data (i.e. data-first strategy should be on the top of the digital-first strategies). These organizations, strategically, provide their employees with analytics tools so making data easily accessible and shareable in a decentralized; liberal, and hence democratic fashion across all business functions and teams so they can:

-?????????Tap and understand data,

-?????????Analyze data at the function level,

-?????????Answer questions and explore insights on their own,

-?????????Use data to personalize the experience,

-?????????Make a down-top decision,

-?????????Avoid legacy systems’ innovation bottlenecks.

I will narrate different data management processes, tools, and their usage in a later stage of my article. However, to democratize data, data management tools are essential to visualizing and understanding data. The availability of such tools can inspire teams and make it possible to become a data-driven digital enterprise. But achieving this level of visibility faces a key challenge for many organizations; the lack of a data-driven culture (43%).

Factors Accelerating Data Democratization

The acceptance of digital technology and data democratization is no longer an optional practice for modern organizations. In fact, more than ever, the pace of digital transformation is being accelerated by four key external factors beyond businesses’ control:

1-??Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic:

The new mutation of the COVID-19 pandemic stressed the need for a proactive digital transformation approach, along with business principles that can survive future disruptive changes in how and where we work.

2-??Competition on a Broader Scale:?

The global market introduces new opportunities and greater potential alongside the increased competition. To keep up the competitive edge, organizations need to realign end-to-end digital workflows to reach, serve, and communicate with clients at planet scale (a sustainable eco-system).

3-??Evolving Customer Expectations:

Digital was previously regarded as a new sales channel; it is now the primary business model. To create remarkable customer experiences (CX) that foster loyalty and earn referrals-hence values, organizations need to provide multi-channel digital customer (including fully self-service) experiences, flawless customer support, and personalized interactions at every touchpoint on the digital customer’s journey.

4-??Work Culture and Preferences Paradigm Shift:

Shifting to remote work is becoming the norm and it is evolving (either by preference or necessity). This necessitates creating more flexible, adaptable systems, procedures, and workflows thru implementing digital tools that enhance online collaboration and communication; to prevent business workflows disruption. Employee Experiences (EX) thru work paradigm shift has a major positive impact on Customer Experiences (CX).

These external factors influence the demand to compile a huge volume of data (internally and externally); (a) to be analyzed, (b) to create meaningful insights and hence (c) add more business values.

We passed the era of applauding digitalization being part of every organization Board’s agenda, and now we are welcoming the “data” ear as it is becoming a key valuable asset and the foundation of digitalization. Its availability and quality are crucial for an organization’s digital success, making it an important economic asset for the survival of the business. It is therefore apparent that this asset should be carefully and strategically maintained and developed.